Why funding open source is NOT philanthropy with Pavlenex | SLP734

**Pavlenex** (0:00)
The best way to kill an open-source project is to undermine the meritocracy that powers it. In Bitcoin, we are already seeing this happening on certain projects, right? You found one person, you found one project that is closely related to this, and then all of this pyramid of meritocracy starts crashing. So what I personally am advocating there is that all of these things can be solved if more entities acted in their own self-interest, selfish interests, basically.

**Stephan Livera** (0:29)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, I have my friend Pavlenex rejoining me on the show. Many of you will know him for his work on BTCPay. Of course, he is working on SV2, Stratum V2, a lot nowadays also.
And yeah, welcome back to the show Pavlenex.

**Pavlenex** (0:45)
Hey, Stephan. It's a pleasure to be here. I believe this is my fourth time on the show, so breaking my own personal records.

**Stephan Livera** (0:55)
That's right. Yeah. Well, I saw you wrote an article recently, I thought it would be good to chat about it. Obviously, it's related to open source and Bitcoin and building in this industry, let's say. And I guess, there is this mindset that open source is philanthropy. So as I understand, your article is challenging that idea. So give us the pitch, why is it not philanthropy?

**Pavlenex** (1:22)
Right. So my article isn't really challenging it. I do believe there is a little bit philanthropy involved in open source. Maybe when we speak about open source, all of us Bitcoiners immediately think how funding works in Bitcoin, and then we try to project them to broader open source and how funding works there. But yeah, my main problem with that article that I wrote, it was inspired by, we can talk about it in a moment, what inspired me, but what I'm arguing there is that companies actually can benefit from supporting open source on a strategic level, so they can even gain profitability out of it in the long term. And there is multiple benefits that a lot of companies don't really think of when they think about supporting open source. So my main goal there was to try to explain to corporations, or even to people in general who think that open source is just, or rather supporting open source is marketing stunt, or goodwill, or just like, let's just do it because it's good for community, so philanthropy. So yeah, I outlined some of the talking points that I personally use when I speak about open source funding and try to pitch it to corporations.
So yeah, hopefully it motivates people and corporations to, it motivates maybe contributors to better pitch their own work when they speak about their work, publicly or try to get funding or it helps corporations.

**Stephan Livera** (2:56)
Because you're saying it's also like, put it this way, on the fundee recipient side, maybe there's an angle of how they pitch it also, that maybe they're not pitching it in the right way so that the funder side of it doesn't understand the value because they're not pitching it in the right way. So I guess in a sense, you're not only pitching, you're not only speaking to companies or wealthy individuals who might be engaging in FOSS funding, you're also kind of helping people understand where is the value here.

**Pavlenex** (3:25)
Yes. I also want to give context on like why am I the person that can speak about this? So I worked in free and open source software for nine years now. Seven of those years I was funded through grants, but I worked two, two and a half years without any support early on in my career. So I've been on the receiving side of free and open source funding, but also I try to help others build career in Bitcoin, get funding, get jobs in companies, and I try to pitch free and open source funding to the various companies. So I've been involved in this ecosystem for quite a while, and I think I've seen ins and outs in both sides. Like I see arguments that corporations have against, I see how individual contributors maybe undermine their own contributions in work because I often hear like, oh, maybe why would somebody pay me to play around and just do what I like? So they don't really see that their work actually benefits a wider ecosystem.
So yeah, just to be also transparent, I'm currently funded by Spiral. So just to give clarity, like when I speak about things, I'm also personally funded by a grant. So just want to be transparent there. So I have a pretty practical perspective of how things work. And I've seen maybe some incentives being broken as well on how things shouldn't work. So we can also talk about that.