 I think it's fantastic. Mario as Fosage co-founder and someone who has a particular interest in making this work and Meng Wang who has a background in, amongst other things, running an accelerator for startups and the particular importance that will become clear later in the panel. So, before I go anywhere with the panelists, firstly some background, why this panel or how it came about. Three years ago we had Dr Vivian Malakrishnan, then Minister for Environment currently for Foreign Affairs came to Fosage and spoke about open source and open data. And in his marathon Q&A, one of the questions he asked was, how many people in the room would like to become millionaires out of open source software? And this is not a joke because he was really concerned that a whole lot of people are going to spend years of their lives in creative endeavour into this stuff because we love doing it because it's fun and not derive profits by it, indeed to have other people do so. And so his concern was how many of us are going to be able to build businesses that will thrive on the development of open source software or at least substantial development of open source software as a side effect. Also as a Minister of Government of course he has an interest in strengthening the economy, not merely looking after people in the room. So I'll come back to that question in a moment because I'm going to ask the people in the room the same question. The second part of the genesis for the panel is the Fosage organisation itself, which has a little bit of the cobbler's children problem. Fosage is involved in promoting open source and indeed in teaching people the programme in the first place, all of whom then promptly go and get jobs from companies who pay much more than Fosage can pay and we therefore have difficulty funding some of our own infrastructure work. And so there's a question there around how to do that. This is in fact a sort of consulting session for Fosage in addition to being a panel for the conference. Before I direct questions to the panellists I will now ask questions of the audience. The first, Dr Vivian's question, how many people in the room would like to become millionaires out of developing open source software? Oh God, only about half. How many people in the room are already? That's an even smaller, no that wasn't quite the question. Let's stick with US dollars. Are currently earning a living, I would suggest as either an employee or as a freelancer, where much or all of your work is developing open source software? Okay, so there's almost a third, perhaps a quarter. So that's actually quite healthy. How many or are there any who are in a more entrepreneurial mode looking to build businesses? Creating open source software? A few of those, wonderful. One other category who I'm afraid I won't serve very well in this discussion other than the sort of broad overview. I know there's a few over there. How many in the room are in large organizations trying to understand how best to engage with or use or take advantage of or develop open source software to sort of sustain those businesses or to develop those businesses rather than sort of strike it on their own? Okay, a few more than I expected. Okay, is anyone in the room for any other reason? They were all the cases I could think of but I, no? Okay, fabulous. Hello. I have prepared notes because this is actually quite a large complicated topic. So fundamental differences. The description for the panel session in the program starts out with the observation that free open source software is different to closed software not just because the license is different because the ways of benefiting are different. Great examples of that in Kubernetes. The question that that begs in my mind is where's the money for open developers? We have a good sense of where it is for closed developers. You either sell licenses or you sell service running your software on your own computers. Where is it for open developers? I think I might start this one with Chris. Who's pinging for things that cause the creation and strengthening of open source software? Sure, absolutely. So I've been at Red Hat for about 13 years selling free software and I would say one of the sweet spots is certainly in regulated industries. They tend to certainly have a need for security, for a contact to get support and help. So traditional support subscriptions have been very popular with regulated industries. They're a little bit less risk-taking in terms of going on their own as well. Positive way of saying it. That's been sectors like telco, public government, finance, also healthcare and any other regulated industries. I think looking forward like the transportation industry is certainly another key industry as well. As cars start driving. Driving themselves. Yep. Yeah. DeSanne, you have perhaps another broader source of customers who are paying for open source development. And feel free to outline what you're doing for the benefit of the audience. Everyone knows who Red Hat is. I don't think everyone knows who Mountain Source is. Yeah. So yeah. I'm actually a traditional early stage investor who wants to make money out of my investments. But I'm also third generation Nikola Tesla. So I guess I'm a little bit nuts. So we looked at this company called Bounty Source three, four years ago. I think at that stage we had about 10,000 open source developers registered, which doesn't mean that everybody's active. And basically we went to the market. It had actually existed for 10 years as a community, but we kind of gave it a restart in 2013, 14. And basically said, are there companies that would like to pose a problem, a bounty, and then would any of these 10,000 open source developers claim it and solve it and get paid. And that's really the business model of Bounty Source. So today there are 48,000 registered, I would just say, open source developers. Obviously everybody's not active. You can see all the stats at the bottom of the page. If you want to see how many are active or not active per day and month and how many issues and bounties are out there. And we went out and yes, we did find some companies that were interested in that. And mainly tech companies to start with. So our largest contributor and customer is actually IBM, which is a little bit surprising, I would say. And I think it has to do with people that there is a very strong advocate within IBM who just loves this and somehow managed to get four of his departments to do this. So that's one model. So that means that the bounty is worth $10,000. You go, you take it, claim it, solve the problem and you get 10%. Sorry, sorry. The open source developer gets 90%. We get 10%. Yes, yes. Not the other way around. It's vitally important to get the right way around. I didn't think to ask before the session, are you able to talk in dollar terms about the sort of volume of business on the market or is that not yet public? How much? Oh no, it's all on the side as well. So you can actually get the numbers on the side. Actually I don't know on top of my head how much it is. But you know you see daily volume if you just look at the site right now that you can see that there are a couple thousand dollars per day. I mean you see it all in real time. So it's very transparent. So that's one way. Now the other way that I think is actually more interesting, this is from the corporate point of view, right? But the other way is that it's what we call sort, which is the Roman word for decent salary. So that's the second product there. And what that means is if you do have a project, it's more the kind of three, four, five, six entrepreneurs here. So if you do have a project and want somebody to share the cost of your project, you go to sort and then I can put with my credit card a monthly contribution of a dollar, five, ten, fifteen, which is a recurrent takeaway from my credit card. And that actually has worked really well. You can see how the sort project has gone up. You can see all the statistics. So there are hundreds of micro projects there that basically where you get contribution on a monthly basis. And then each of the project owners explains what he's going to do with the money, if it's a milestone or how does it work. So you kind of follow the project. So that has worked. I don't want to say that it's a huge unicorn, but it's going in the right direction. We got some new owners recently. So I believe that this can actually take off now. That doesn't concern me. My purpose for the panel was to start putting real examples in front of people to make it real. So the fact that it's fledgling is fine. On that model, when you first described it, I thought it was a bit strange, but I then realized that I do exactly that as a member of Hacker Space here and as a contributor to Wikipedia. In both cases, I just have an automatic monthly payment that supports those projects. So it's actually not that everybody will do it, but it's not an entirely unusual model to set that up. So I'm extremely impressed with this model. I want to see it grow. Man, you had some thoughts, I suspect, on other places where obvious and really quite acute needs for open source expertise to be applied to problems that are hurting large businesses and small businesses and everything in between. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about this and to me, software is a means of expression. You've got this programming language and then you write programs in it, which other people feel very strong emotions about when they need to maintain it. And so in that sense, it's kind of like creative writing. It's the sort of thing that gets sponsored on Patreon or on Etsy, right? Only the difference is the stuff that we make as programmers is able to run not just inside people's heads, it's able to run on software, hardware, sort of machines that are sort of in the cloud. The interesting analogy there is people pay for this kind of expression in all kinds of different ways. And authors and journalists are asking exactly the same questions about how do we get paid in this brave new world. So for me, I was thinking back to a great work of literature, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, which if you remember, in the far future, there are two kinds of people. There are the Eloi who live in the sun and there are the Morlocks who live underground in the sort of scheme tunnels. And I think the analogy is that the Eloi are the people who use the apps in the app store and they pay for the apps. And then the interface is really interesting, right? Because underneath, you've got the Morlocks who are doing the engineering. And the Morlocks are now having to figure out how to have their own little underground markets in the form of bounty source and solve. So that's just an observation. And the serious issue here is that if SSL doesn't get paid for, if GPG doesn't get paid for, there are serious consequences both underground and above in the real world. And in fact, those are the ones that I was particularly thinking of as acute problems. Because everyone depends on a SSL. That's right. These are what we might call public goods, right? And yet governments are all saying, you know, why should we be the ones to pay for it? We pay for roads. We pay for hospitals. We pay for schools. We don't pay for software. They pay for police. Yeah. So I... Anyway, the argument that I think is that there's... This is perhaps to your fundamental question. There are a number of sources of demand where there is, I feel, compelling reason to believe you will pay for the things that we'll need. The list of approaches is enormous. And this is... I thought about it. I don't think we can do this justice in a 60-minute panel. Lemonade Stand is a project that a lady who researches this specifically does. She's listed on GitHub the 20 major ways people sort of make money on open source. I'm just going to skip that section because we could spend two hours on that alone. But the public goods question is, I suspect, the broader area to dig. And so... Is... I don't know if Meng has a deep understanding of this problem. Is public goods funding something that any of the other panelists have considered? We should microphone. Chris, Moe, have any of you guys had a reason to think about public goods funding? Public... The funding of public goods. So public infrastructure, security, things of that kind, which are... Yeah. Yeah. So this idea has been around for some time. I remember the Creative Commons idea that we have public goods and we have that in Europe. So that, for example, like for television, for radio and so on, that everyone has to pay a certain amount. So this was a question, like when the music came on a Napster, all these things, like this was a big discussion at that time. But like, yeah, there are different models now. I don't know. So the question with these models is always, who distributes them? What is the perfect way to distribute it and who controls it? So I don't know. The states, there are so many states, and I don't think the state is a good distributor of these kind of services. How do you measure? Do you measure according to users? Well, then you can just stay with the current model. So I don't know. There are two ways to approach this question of how to make money with FOS. One way is the current system, like how is the setup? How can actually, how can FOS entrepreneurs succeed in the current system? And the second question is, how can we adapt a system to the needs of open source because it's good for the, how do you say, good for the public benefit? Yeah, yeah, you could say like that. So open source people, open source applications, they're often doing good. They benefit everyone. Okay, so these are two different questions and at the moment I think I would rather focus on this question of how can we succeed in this environment because we have to talk on a different level maybe, too. Sure, I was thinking more the, I'm sorry. I kind of have a slightly different angle on it. So I was in Dubai last, I was at Los Sunday. They work on Sundays, which is great. It gives me an extra working day. So, you know, they want to put what they are, putting the whole public administration on blockchain, the vision of 2020, the land registry, the tourist board, whatever. And obviously it's not exactly, you know, all our 48,000 open source developers wouldn't actually have exactly the skillset that they are requesting. But for me that was an embryo of a very interesting kind of public partnership of our community to see if we could tap in from, you know, if they could put in bits and pieces like in bounties of that big project and offer that out. That I actually believe in and I see it in a very pragmatic way that we can, because they don't have, you know, they don't have 48,000 developers and I mean they can take all the developers to Dubai but they're never going to solve it. So I was kind of asking them if they could kind of put it in bits and pieces and put it in counter bounties the way we work. And obviously it's a vision, obviously it's going to take ages but that's where I believe there is an opportunity in countries that are opening up their public administration that way. And they see that it can't be done maybe just with the big guys like IBM or consensus or whatever. So that is, I think, an opportunity. We had a Singapore government rep keynoting last year at Fosazure announcing such a program within Singapore exactly that they are letting out the contract in small pieces that don't need giant contractors exactly because Singapore has historically always been about strengthening Singapore Inc and therefore the two or three major SIs here. But it's now being recognized that there's a number of problems that one that we care about which is that open source developers get paid but a bunch of other related problems and so there's an active initiative to do exactly what you're describing to the point where it's possible to slice out small pieces and then contract them out to individual developers. So you made another point to me though about the ICOs that have all occurred in the last 12 months and the amount of engineering talent that they're going to need in order to deliver. Yeah, so that's more of a Robin Hood, right? So all these companies have raised so much money so they need to use it, right? So there my view is that whatever, what was it now? H, Contra, never knows. I don't quote more of this but I think it was 891 projects that raised about $6 billion last year. And one thing that they don't have a clue about is actually how they're going to execute those because they've all put some kind of white papers but they don't have a clue really what to do. And I think that's another opportunity to tap into. And I really think that that could be more than a decent Roman salary. More than sort because they actually do have money. So that's maybe another opportunity. So how to make money with FOSS? Of course you can have a job somewhere. You can have a job as an open source developer everywhere today. So you don't need like a FOSS company. But where are the new big, or the companies that get big, the new big FOSS companies? Where are they? So there are a few, okay, but they are mainly maybe from the west but which are the ones started in recent years? Like when Red Hat was started and followed it the first few years, we thought, okay, they're going to be like a lot of these kind of companies. We see companies that are established, traditional companies, switching more and more to open source, but I don't see so many companies that actually become big and make an open source model. And especially my question is, what about Asia? We are here in Asia, like a lot of these companies, of course they have a longer tradition in Europe and the US with the open source, in order to succeed with this also different vision of how knowledge, how everything is shared. We need more companies here in Asia who really like founded by open source and free software contributors and who follow this model of sharing. So how can we get this done apart from job opportunities? And the interesting thing that I see here is we have a lot of open source project. I think many of them have a commercial opportunity but we know like that not everyone has a drive to be a businessman. However, maybe some have or some would like to team up and the fantastic thing is we already have technology. There is maybe not a product that is ready for the consumer market but like a lot of open source applications they are already very good. So it's not like a traditional startup where you say, okay, let's raise money, we have this idea, we hire developers, we do this and that, I really know how to make a pitch and a business plan and my father has some friends. But it's really like here we have often technology and so we just need the business on top and not like the business and the technology developed. So this is more or less the next thing I want to talk about. No, not at all. It means that my sequence is logical. So yes, the fact that the Fossager Accelerator was announced yesterday is right on the point and I want to hit. The difference, and this is a bit like the entrepreneur first model that I think men could describe to us where many accelerators are a business grad with a PowerPoint tech looking for a code monkey. We're now having the other problem which is we've got solid engineering and a very large body of existing code and the question is, okay, how do we locate a market and service customers and build businesses on this? And on top of that, and this is, I think, the question for Fossager, is there scope to build an institutional structure, call it an accelerator, but the details will be specific to foster that activity and can Fossager do it? The second half of the question. To encourage and train and support developers who have an entrepreneurial event, who have a strong commitment to open source and who want to build businesses around developing and strengthening ideally existing open source software rather than creating yet another thousand half-baked ideas. And if so, what might such an institution look like? That's really a question I'd first put in men's direction given your direct experience in running an accelerator. Right, so just to give some background, from 2012 onwards, I was involved in an accelerator incubator called JFDI and we made about 70 investments in start-ups over the course of three years. And we learned some interesting lessons about that, which was that it's not easy to be Y Combinator. In fact, Y Combinator itself had trouble being Y Combinator. They actually started out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of MIT and Harvard, and they weren't doing very well until they moved to Silicon Valley. So the lesson there is, I don't know, maybe we need to move to Silicon Valley, but that's not the answer we want to hear. And like VCs moving out of Silicon Valley at the moment? Right, so that's another pendulum shift. So just the background there is that we recruited teams, a hacker, a hustler and a hipster to build small companies that would hopefully get big and we succeeded in doing that reasonably well. And so I think there is an understood model in how to accelerate small start-ups to the point of break-even, profitability, series A in this country and in the region and just generally that knowledge is out there. It's a different question to say how do we bring a nonprofit to the same point of sustainability because you don't get a lot of social impact investing the way you get a lot of VC investing. And yet the world is turning toward social impact and social issues and social good. So I see open source software as a fantastic example of a high social impact public good. Now traditionally this would be the domain of government to fund, right? I've talked about how FOSS Asia has the problem of educating young people who then go off and get jobs and don't necessarily give back and that problem is very acutely felt by any educational institution in the world other than possibly Harvard because every school faces that problem and every school has pretty much solved that problem by saying we're going to have a financial model where you do student loans or governments will just pay for it. Now in our world that doesn't really happen, right? I don't see the government funding open source education. To some extent they do. You've got GA and a lot of that is funded by the government. To some extent people can take loans to go out and get an education. I would argue that most of the time you don't need to take a loan you just need to have a web browser and the willingness to use Stack Overflow instead of Facebook that can be a difficult thing for a lot of people. This is also partly the two different meanings or values we attach to education. One is mastering the skill set and or thinking and the other is getting a bit of paper. The loan driven, limited supply of universities and powers to about degrees by legislators is about the signaling it's not about the expertise and so the open source community in particular because a lot of us do this for the plan of it has much more interest in the format. So I think I know we're talking about the where is the money in open source but it might be interesting to contrast our discussion with what might be going on in a different room in a different track where they're probably talking about Bitcoin and blockchain. Probably this room in two hours. In this room in two hours I guarantee that people will use the term medium of exchange and store of value to talk about what is money but I would like to play with that idea and say maybe software is a medium of value that isn't money but it definitely has the characteristics of people created, people spend a lot of time contributing value into helping other people with it and all the interaction that you get on websites like Stack Overflow is unpaid but incredibly valuable, isn't it? And it creates a long term store of useful information in the same way that books and papers and journals do only our kind of information is it's tangible and alive and useful in a way that an academic paper isn't even though that's the credential that governments are looking for. You cannot execute an academic paper as you think. Exactly. And so I would just to finish that point humans, we are not the only animal to use tools you can think of crows and chimpanzees and humans are not the only animal to use language but we are the only animal to use language as a tool and when we can use language as a tool at scale running on hardware that makes us, I think, that makes programmers the most evolved form of human being out there. I love the argument. Drifting boldly back towards practicalities. Chris. So supposing hypothetically we sort of build an institutional structure in Accelerator that is focusing on developing whether it's startups or some other structure organizations that operate and thrive building, supporting, maintaining open source software. To what extent are the risk-averse industries and governments going to be willing to talk to organizations at this scale rather than go to the stable established very broad shoulders of Reddit? Sure. So the regulated industries are a great customer base for Reddit but it may not be a great customer base for startups for sure. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to buy from more established companies so I'm not sure I would advise so much targeting regulated industries. They tend to, when I've seen other open source companies that are smaller we just purchase CoreOS for instance and their customer base had some overlap but it also, they were targeting I would say smaller companies as well that Red Hat may have not paid as much attention to. Okay, so niche has arrived simply because of the economies of attention. Red Hat is sort of compelled to focus on bigger, more difficult to service accounts and if we can't chase the, it's got to eat the deer, it can't chase the mice. So you would estimate any number of those small opportunities to allow small organizations to at least get started. Yeah, absolutely and then I also see in terms of monetization there's a traditional software direct sell but we also see companies have monetized open source in an indirect manner and then their payment back has been giving back open source. So if you look at any of the large internet companies Facebook, Google, et cetera they are actually centers of innovation for open source as you saw in the previous talk with different projects, Cassandra, Kubernetes, et cetera, open compute and they are certainly if open source didn't exist they probably wouldn't exist at the scale that they did so early in their lifetime just to the economies of scale and of open source but they have been giving back so they've been good citizens of open source and they've been able to monetize open source as well. A further piece in that actually came up in the last presentation that hadn't occurred to me in preparing the panel if you are not in the business of selling software licenses it's a whole lot easier to share your software. So this is not the red hats or maybe Google but I'm thinking I know Diamers in the Room and there are others who are not software companies and give or take there are some things that are either far too sensitive or that are differentiating they spent a great deal on at least integrating and occasionally in sort of not invented here mode actually reinventing stuff that exists and in fact it's been official I would suggest for them to be using and or sharing and or you know joining the pool for those things that are not differentiating and where they're not selling licenses or something like that. Yeah it's a constant conversation I have especially in Silicon Valley but not invented here we see a lot of folks at these larger internet companies inventing their own technologies just for the sake of doing that and sometimes I scratch my head and it's actually evolved into a more serious challenge because they have a hard time with engineers that want to learn this proprietary one-off technology when they're changing jobs every two years in the valley so it's becoming more and more difficult with a low unemployment rate how do you attract engineers to work on your proprietary junk open source technologies that they can put on their resume and they can be relevant to the next assignment and then also how do you quickly scale up your new engineers and have them be productive quickly well if you're leveraging open standard open source technologies they can come off the street and be a lot more productive lower your training costs and as a result you're going to have a much more efficient organization so we've definitely had many cases of customers who are very much about inventing their own maybe middleware server their own orchestration tier have definitely changed that opinion as it's become more and more difficult to scale out their engineering organization so that's a piece of what we heard yesterday from Daimler about in fact the number one reason for engaging with open source was speed of innovation attracting engineers was number two and costs was number three we like to say no one's smarter than everyone and that's really reflective of open source right so I don't have a list of other things sorry I don't have quite on this side any other comments at this moment that maybe on the social impact thing that Ming mentioned and the blockchain thing I do actually believe that that's huge I was recently in Istanbul we called it whatever the world business angel slash social impact forum and I really believe that these user cases are strong so somewhere that interface between social impact and open source and blockchains somewhere there I really see some money coming and maybe even stronger in the social impact piece actually also from a regulatory point of view I think all these blockchains what do we really want to do it's about inclusion, financial inclusion and that's huge and if we can get and that is a social impact project in itself and obviously yes it's true that European and American investors are more eager to invest into social impact projects but here the social impact project is so such a big opportunity in this part of the world that it becomes interesting for everyone including myself I'm not a traditional social impact investor I've participated as a mentor in the DBS social relation programs so yes they're not on the scale of American and European programs but it is happening and interestingly it's happening not doing that exclusively in government maybe not even primarily in government I think that there are enough interests outside of government who want to see the society around them function then if you add the Middle East experience when you know the whole kind of Islamic thing in terms of how they invest because it's not an interest to returns but it has to have that dimension and again was referring to some of the discussions in Dubai then you get another source of financing and you kind of somehow make it I know I'm just brainstorming here Sharia compliant and then it becomes very attractive so can I respond to that point so based on what you said about social impact and the opportunity for blockchain and open source that whole nexus I'd like to propose this is off the top of my head I'd like to propose a dichotomy between financial impact and social impact and it seems to me that if the goal is financially impact who wants to be a millionaire who wants to make a lot of money then you're associated with centralizing technologies because take visa for example visa goes and takes 3% of every transaction but they are one organization Mastercard Amex but these things tend to centralize social impact has different goals and I would argue that they tend to decentralize and because ultimately if you want to create social impact you have to do it at scale and you can't have the giant red cross go out there and solve everybody's problems the only way to solve everybody's problems is to have everybody working on it and so that's naturally decentralized and decentralization relies on open protocols open protocols rely on open source software and open source software can be connected to blockchain when you look at things like IPFS and Filecoin I think are really interesting examples of how you can tokenize and infrastructure decentralize open source open standard protocol but also have money around it so I think that might open a different discussion I missed one step so the project you were describing so IPFS the interplanetary file system where's the money associated so the challenge here is how do we have an internet scale database that is not hosted at AWS and so the answer is it has to be hosted in everybody's home behind your little DSL router now how do you incentivize people to provide that hosting service and keep your hard drive turned on when you're not at home and it's a little bit like the BitTorrent question some people do it because they're just naturally doing that but if you put a financial incentive behind it you say for every file that belongs to somebody else that I host I get paid a tiny chunk of coin then you've got a financial mechanism to encourage everybody to have a hard drive at home connect to the internet storing everybody else's data in a decentralized way which is not AWS so you've got that protocol you've got the standard you've got the software and you've got the coin so that points a little bit towards one of the ideas that Murray you had proposed which was not a reformed idea but a sort of a straw man for discussion was a decentralized economy platform imagine an open B&B setting aside the problem of telling people we are sleeping that's creepy and dangerous but that right now where all the sharing economy companies are built on the fact that they simultaneously solve inventory and discovery payment clearance and dispute resolution if we can firstly decouple these three things then we have a shot perhaps at producing open systems that are sort of community wide for the communities they serve is that a in the right direction well it's a lot of different topics yes okay I mean decentralization is a big topic for years we've worked on the just the search engine like in the first Asia we make a front and for this search engine so it's decentralized it's been used in governments and so on so yeah we're working on this and decentralization is definitely great but here also the question was in the past how to commercialize it so if we can go that way if there's maybe blockchain some technology is a solution that would be great but like already companies are using decentralized infrastructures themselves like even one company can have different service but my argument was broader than that so think about the hypothetical open BNB let's use an IPFS or some sort of distributed blockchain system to deal with the storing and the processing of the data and the listing and the discovery problem which are things that these distributed systems are good at distributed technical systems are good at you still have to solve payment clearing and you still have to solve dispute resolution and that's dispute resolution I turned up and your house didn't exist or it was extremely filthy or whatever or you claim that I didn't manage your house and someone has to make decisions that service is worth real money PayPal's three and a half percent most of that is in fact dispute resolution well this is the question maybe here if we could learn from the open source community how are issues resolved here disputes are resolved some communities are better at this at FOSS-Ager we have the best practices which we try as a guideline most of the cases they work out so it's a web of trust we had that discussed elsewhere so if you could form a web of trust and people say ok I trust this person because another one trusts them if you can use new technologies that would be great but in that case again I'm asking like so will this be open source so if yes then I'm definitely for it so like the open Airbnb something like that would be great but we need it open so what's the business model then? what I was guessing at was you can open the application but you still need human effort to resolve disputes so in the real economic value people pay actual money for that in the PayPal case it's 3.5% of every transaction most of that is in fact about dispute resolution and in fact one of the problems for blockchain currencies is that that doesn't exist if I train some money to you and then we have a dispute well I'm stuffed and so there's this real value in providing dispute resolution services and perhaps allowing an open market for multiple so right now if you're trading oil that operates somewhat competitively and they run at a profit so you're building up software and open systems that don't have lockout but your question is how do our would-be entrepreneurs that we wish to help accelerate how do they make money in this context in order to feed themselves so I'm having difficulties to judge when will we be at this stage to have the technology ready when will we actually all use blockchain instead of like normal money some use cases where it can be used now and maybe for big transactions and like yes but when it will be ready there's a lot of talk about it I'm not suggesting that it has to be a blockchain based on money that's a whole separate question nothing else comes to my mind that could solve this problem PayPal already says the obvious model PayPal but then you need it's a bank and it's difficult to scale up so actually I like what Meng said about the experience making small ideas into a break-even point into series A something like that that is what we would like to achieve so the question is how can we go here I've got a few ideas that's great we're looking for mentors we're looking for partners people who would like to invest so that would be great and we are in a super big growing market most of the developers that we have are from India, we have a lot in Vietnam Bangladesh, Sri Lanka so yeah this is where everyone wants to go because here we need new solutions the blockchain example is a technology but you need people in process and so the person in the future may not be physical, maybe a computer program that does the dispute resolution but you'll still need the person to do the enforcement so just on the another reaction to dispute resolution I think it's all about governments and how do you actually solve dispute resolution and I do believe that there are learnings from the open source community how you do governments in a community and I think actually I don't think we should go to a visa or to bitcoin to kind of get whatever inspired but actually how our community projects solved in general in terms of dispute resolution and I think that's the future of governments it must be based on something, some criteria it doesn't have to be a centralized body like a paper or a visa and that's what is so powerful now I don't have the magic formula what that would look like but that's where I think the solution is I'd point out that it's already visible in large markets between distribution chains, if you're buying a commodity you're not locked into the market for oil there are only two price setting markets and six secondary markets for light sweet crude for example they're not locked into one dispute resolution mechanism there are competing providers of dispute resolution services that are used by participants in those markets so I think we can get away from decentralization and nonetheless but nonetheless produce profitable businesses that are providing a real value perhaps with the help of AI perhaps not, but that are providing something that has real economic value without getting into centralized mechanisms hadn't thought about the sort of local community level mechanisms that implicitly exist that might be a better starting point and ADR the mechanisms are used in in natural markets so there are many things other than central solutions and I think a lot of those companies you know, like you mentioned Airbnb you mentioned Uber, you mentioned LinkedIn you mentioned PayPal how would you start these companies today? definitely not the way from a very centralized structure that they used to I always give you this example I was one of the first LinkedIn users in Europe and I basically emailed 1000 of my friends and called them and said, do you want to use LinkedIn? I've just sent you an invite by email and the other people would take up the phone what are you talking about? well I trust me, it is something that will be useful so I did that for 1000 people and I got a small little letter of Ray Hoffman saying thank you I just I build my company and that was not very sharing from my point of view we built a lot of value there so I think if I would start LinkedIn or PayPal or an Airbnb or a Uber today I would start on the sharing principle that whoever shares gets something for it and that is way more in my world than just the salt that I mentioned about the decent salary it can be way more because basically you're sharing, you're getting a benefit and that's what me I think is talking about some kind of token or whatever it's going to be called based on real sharing not on this hype that we see out there well that's also a principle for a system based on openness and community-wide problem solving rather than on exclusion and then externalizing costs so that we haven't got time to touch the Islamic finance question but actually that happens to be the basis for the Islamic finance rules it's an interesting piece there's one final question I want to put to the panel but it occurs to me I've forgotten to ask the audience are there any questions from the audience at this point? I'll be putting everyone to sleep all right okay in that case I will tackle the final topic I want to put to the panel yep so the last thing discussed was something really interesting about the sharing model built into this new enterprises that are about to be started and then for Saisha incubator is one example of such enterprise that you want to talk about that one a little bit how it's going to be addressed there Maria do you want to describe the plans for the Saisha incubator in this session or is that a topic from the other day? do you mean like what we want to do? building well company with a social and park or enterprise with a social and park which for Saisha is and then there was question of sharing and participating in that you know by structure I can mention a bit what for Saisha is I mean for Saisha as a community we also set it up as a company here in Singapore which is basically to run the event and actually if we look to the US or Europe you can't do things in the same way here in Asia like you can't just register an NGO and say okay we organize an event in China yeah and as you can see the Linux foundation for example they also set up a company to organize the open source summit in China I think so these were some challenges that we were thinking for several years and we didn't find the perfect solution so if anyone has ideas please come to me I think we have the same thing when we organize something in India and so on so how to run an event without an organization originally it was like a community mainly and just out of necessities we have organizations to run things so now as the times have changed I'm originally from Berlin Germany so I saw like in the 90s a lot of people like their coding in the hackerspace and the sea base and so on and actually nobody cared about money like even people said free software also means free I don't care right no need and but also in Europe they have changed and they say listen I need to make an income I need to make money I need to fund my family everyone has a startup things are growing so I say why don't we do this with open source and I'm a bit puzzled also if I look at the old ones if we say the real model is the data and actually we are not selling software why Airbnb is not open source why Eventbrite is not open source if the model is actually the data itself okay so it tends to be more on the Linux layer or on the back end layer on different layers but we don't see it so much as a real complete service like I like the services like WordPress for example everyone can run it you can extend it it's a nice model so I would like to see more models like that where people can share it so I would like to support these kind of models and we don't have huge resources at FOS Asia but we have a lot of contacts we have friends we have sometimes people who say oh yeah invest in something that makes sense for me and I think like in order to make a real like successful company in a way that break even point generate income you don't need 2 million maybe you need 200,000 yeah if it's a free software company because you have a lot of people contributing and they can also use it for their business for example we have this eventier system open event they it's not ready for everyone yet but I would say I'm not going to run this in Sri Lanka I'm not going to run this in Korea so it would be great to see people using these kind of systems and let's say take away some market share from Eventbrite yeah so things like this would be great and actually we want to support these kind of projects and ideas people who make apps on open standards why not have an Instagram version in Japanese but it's not Instagram it's an open source Instagram and we're all using the same standards we're all using the same APIs you can put it together and there are ideas like I think for Twitter there's an alternative MetaMost and yeah people are starting this and we want to be part of this so it's all great so if you have ideas I'm happy to share more details like for example like we also own a small hotel in Vietnam and one of our ideas was okay so let's see let's see this accelerator and let's see what resources we have people it's not only about money it's also about resources so why we don't offer like hey you have a startup you want to make a workshop why don't you come over for months stay in our hotel use our office and what you want to do we help you we can like have calls together with different people investors or whoever can help to make your project run in a sustainable way so after you finish your studies you don't have to go really to work for a big company or like pitch with like somebody from the business department you can actually grow your own thing and I think this is what we've seen like as far as I understand from Google and others they actually come from a tech background and yeah so I don't know so I think we can have a separate session on this but like it gives you a few ideas I want to put one final question and I know we're going to just slightly overshoot it'll be a question to Chris but it's perhaps Meng could well hang on Meng, how do you might because I'm going to ask you to motivate the question it's a problem with extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations and it's what happens when you sort of pour money into an area that's full of people who are doing stuff for the love of it and who are volunteers and I think the way you expressed it yesterday was it might actually be a violation of the social contract to introduce contractors you gave an example about teaching dolphins and chimps to use money I think and the question that Chris will be had is may I avoid this but please if you want to set out the question I think the research shows that if you pay people to be creative they will end up being less creative than if you hadn't paid them and they were doing it out of love and passion and the question of you know is the love of money the root of all evil it is I think there's recent social science primate research that shows you can train chimpanzees to participate in a monetary economy you can pay them in cucumbers you can pay them in grapes any sophisticated brain is able to grasp the concept of trade and money and if you don't pay a chimpanzee what that chimpanzee is worth it gets really angry at you and I feel like to a certain degree talking about paying open source developers sort of creates this it sort of brings us into that world where we're sullying the purity and the beauty of it of course it's easy to talk about purity and beauty when you're not actually poor and worried about where you're next paycheck is coming from so we have to balance these tensions so my question then to Red Hat it's not so much not actually the direct problem of engineers coming aboard remaining engaged but have you had the problem of bringing your sort of paid engineers into an existing project and perhaps pursuing objectives that the project's existing maintainers aren't so excited about and or become disengaged because now there's paid guys pushing for stuff to happen sure I mean there certainly are politics in all communities so we've definitely had our fair share of community disagreements technology wise political wise, customer wise very polite way of saying it I think that's to be expected has there been a widely applicable strategy to limiting the scope of damage that does sure so I think the project governance setting that up as in the talk before this we talked about setting up the Linux foundation and how they run their communities and we've learned from Red Hat and we've been advising private companies on how to set up their own internal kind of open source communities as well so that's one aspect is just getting a company within itself to start sharing code across organizations and having governance and enabling contributions and collaboration you heard that one last year actually from IBM where the idea that the connection source was visible to every single IBM engineer on earth was unprecedented and suddenly they were getting patched they were getting full requests from people they'd never heard of who they didn't know were using their software in Uzbekistan to take the argument but you know at Red Hat we tend to hire those folks that are already actively involved in communities and it doesn't matter where they live in the world it's more about what they're doing in the community and the influence that they have so that we can leverage that on behalf of our customer base and those are really the two thoughts I wanted to offer to say that one you're going to do anyway hire the community leaders but the other is pay close attention to governance when this engagement starts to happen because it won't always go right but you can make it go badly less frequently by paying attention to it we're now over time so I think at this point may I have a round of thanks for the panelists