Gitcoin Interivew w/ Kevin Owocki: Open Source-ing Blockchains

Gitcoin is the easiest way to monetize or incentivize work in Open Source Software.

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Open Source Software is the foundation of millions of careers in software development. For developers, myself included, who have built careers on python, javascript, HTML5, Ubuntu, and countless other Open Source technologies, its easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way.

Before the advent of distributed version control systems like Git in 2005, Open Source was a fringe phenomenon. The launch of Github, several years after Git become a standard, further pushed open source forward by making it easy for developers to share ideas, get feedback, and distribute their code. Today, Github has 5.8 million active users, 331k active organizations, and enabled 815k new users to make their first pull request in 2016 alone.

In a way, Open Source principles have always been a part of the scientific community, and the principle of sharing ideas pre-dates the open source movement. But the speed, non-linearity, and connectedness of the Web 2.0 world has led to unprecedented breakthroughs in geographically distribute communities creating value together — from the invention and subsequent standardization of TCP/IP to the distributed Astrobiology project SETI@home, to the open source financial tool Bitcoin.

As far as Open Source has come, there is still a disconnect between the _value_ that the open source ecosystem provides to the modern economy, and the compensation provided to developers for that impact. The Oracle’s and Red Hat’s of the world have built successful businesses built upon open source, but the small and mid-caps of the world have not yet unbundled those business models.

The launch of Ethereum and the smart contract infrastructure built upon it has the potential to change all that. By tokenizing value and making it programmatically easy and secure to exchange value, there exists an opportunity to push open source forward with borderless, secure, easy payments.

Enter Gitcoin.

Gitcoin Core is a team of developers that believes each of the follow actors in the Open Source ecosystem have a lot to gain by removing middlemen, creating new opportunities, and introducing efficiencies into their workflow:

So what exactly is Gitcoin?

Gitcoin is a distributed network of Smart Contracts, based upon Ethereum that enables:
- Job Hunters to find work, and perhaps more importantly, to try out working together before they commit.
- Open Source Contributors to make a living wage off of their work in open source.
- Repo Maintainers to galvanize an always-on, globalized, network of peers.

By facilitating the transfer of value through this ecosystem, Gitcoin solves for the inefficiencies in this triple-sided market:

Gitcoin is based upon Ethereum, which means that it’s free, fair, and open forever. By eliminating recruiters and other middle, Gitcoin allows software engineers to focus on what they love — building things.