 What is it about the open source that attracts you? I really enjoy the degree to which open source software invites participation from everybody on the internet. It really embraces the transformative power that we see in the internet. The idea that every line of code can be traced back to an individual rather than a corporation is sort of fascinating in the transparency and accountability that it provides. And that accountability I think really has good upward pressure on code quality and community quality and everyone's willingness to be a good citizen. When you started out to make Hypothesis, what problem did you see that you wanted to solve? We are inundated with so much information of all different sorts in our lives. And I think for me there was a point around 2000 where I really started to pay attention to the narrative as told by different people with different points of view and how difficult it seemed for people to come to consensus. I would appreciate having access to people who really knew about a particular domain deeply when I was casually reading some information. And I think that desire to find a way to enable that is what drove me to this project. So then what is it that attracted you to open source as a principal of Hypothesis has developed? We haven't kind of seen other projects that have tried to do this over the last 15 years and kind of deconstructing why we don't have this yet. There's a couple things that became really obvious. One is that trying to create a walled garden and monetize that but at the same time being trying to invite the world in to participate and make it valuable wasn't going to work. Not only are we trying to build this community but we're also trying to build a toolkit that enables this technology to be implemented in this way and then make that toolkit available for anybody else that wants to interoperate and exchange and participate even if they're not using our stuff. Clearly open source as core really resonated with me particularly with respect to Hypothesis as a communication platform inheriting all of the things I like about platforms for communication and how they drive participation from developers. If you are at a company and the software that you're making is not being consumed by you it's a constant struggle to remain in touch with who your users are but when you are your own user is a really powerful motivation that comes from it. I mean the reason I'm in this is to see this change happen and if it happens but it's not us that actually ends up being the ones that gets it over the goal line but somehow we were involved to me that success. When we talk about moving the web forward and communication on the web forward what we want to do is publish in ways that are accessible to everybody who wants to get on that bandwagon. One of the primary things I like about open source and indeed one of the selling points was that when an open source project is truly healthy it doesn't depend on the continued existence of any organization to keep it going forward. It becomes its own breathing entity and its own community.