Incentivized and Decentralized Open Source Projects - Utopian and Nougit

Incentivized open-source

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more interested in open source projects and Github, which is the platform where most of the open source development is made. First, I changed from Windows to Linux, which is an open source Operative System, I also got on an open source antivirus called Clam. Open source has extreme advantages when compared with commercial products. Let’s discuss some of them:

• Lower costs

Most open source projects have a lower cost then those of commercial products, they are built by and for the community. Contrary to most commercial products the upgrades are done by people that love that software, they choose to support it, in commercial products one has to pay exacerbating prices just for one upgrade.

• Built by the community

I’ve seen many commercial products stop being updated because they aren’t sought out. With time and with a decrease in users many commercial products are left untouched and buggy, some lose support for the most current Operative Systems and lose interoperability with many of the new software. With Open Source this stops being an issue, the code is there to be updated or forked by the community. They choose to update it and better it because they want to keep using it, there is no incentive involved, at least not yet… I’ll go about this incentive later in the post.

• Customization

Open source means the code is there for everyone to see, edit or fork, everyone can help, this brings forth a new level of customization never seen before. This is obvious with Linux!

All Linux-based Operative Systems come from Linux, but they all have different levels of customization, and even inside the same OS, they have further customization. Anyone can get X code, fork it and do a better version… Or at least a version that is more in tune with their understanding of what that software should be.

• Superior product

Since the product is made by and for the community this provides a bigger number of developers who are motivated to produce the best quality of product possible. Everyone can help out! Even though most commercial products have big brands and big money behind them they can’t bring the passion and number that an open source project can.

• Security

Since there are a bigger number of developers involved with the project, and the code is open for everyone to see, any vulnerability in the system is more easily found out.

• Licenses

While commercial products have licenses and strict rules on the use and change of their product, just like Windows has on the max number of computers it can be installed on, open source project have no such thing, they can’t have, the code is there for everyone to see… If they choose to make any restriction on it, the code can just be forked and rearranged in order to remove those limits.

Incentivized Open Source Projects

Ok, now that we’ve talked about the big advantages that open source projects provide, let’s talk about money… You guys know how I like money, unfortunately, open source projects aren’t incentivized monetarily, or are they?

There are, at least, 2 projects trying to incentivize commits on open source projects in a decentralized way. Decentralization is important, one of the most used repositories that we had was Github and Windows bought Github a little while ago. This means that Windows as a sort of control in the future of every open source project, which defeats the purpose of open source.

One of these incentivized decentralized projects is built on STEEM while the other is built on EOS. Let’s first talk about the one built on STEEM.

Utopian

Built on top of the STEEM blockchain, Utopian is a community that wants to give part of the STEEM inflation that they control to anyone who helps open source projects.

It can be by giving suggestions, helping with development, bug hunting, translating, graphic designing, analyzing data, marketing, creating documents, tutorials, video tutorials, copywriting or blogging.

They are right now doing crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance their platform called Utopian Colony, which is going to be released Q2-2019 or Q3-2019 depending if you are a backer or not, so far they’ve only gathered $2,185 by 41 backer, their goal is $35,000 in 15 days.

They already have many adopters, inside and outside the STEEM community:

• Coingecko.com – Fundamental analysis of the crypto market

• SteemStem.io – Space for Science, technology, engineering, math bloggers to distribute high quality monetized knowledge

• Actifit.io – Dapp that rewards your everyday activity

• Obyte.org – Crypto platform ready for world adoption through the use of acyclic graph (DAG)

• Steemhunt.com – Ranking cool new products and be rewarded for it

• SteemPress – Plugin to connect word press with Steem

Team

I'll solely stick with the tech and math part of the project, in the tech and math department, we have 3 main guys, at least on their team webpage, those are Diego the founder, Gregory the software Architect and Andrew financial analyst.

• Diego Pucci - 12 years of experience in the tech sector, he already did a bunch! Freelancer, java developer, full stack developer, this guy is an entrepreneur with experience to move the project forward and to move through the barriers that life throws at him.

• Gregory - He is a full stack developer with 11 years of experience, I would love to read his LinkedIn but it's in French, the only things I could gather is that he has experience in the blockchain world, especially STEEM since he worked on busy.org

• Andrew - 25 years of experience, Andrew has been an entrepreneur his whole life, in recent years he has worked in the crypto space in many different jobs developing the space. I loved this entry in his LinkedIn, in 2010 he created ColliSollar a solar farm composed of nine 10kW energy producing farms in rural Australia that sells the energy generated to the grid, providing him passive income.

While I only choose to speak about these three there are many more team members helping out with the project, going from content creators with years of experience to community managers that are in charge with the moderation of the crypto community.

And let's not forget, it's an open source project with his own GitHub repository, so, even though the team members are the ones that choose where the project is going, everyone can help and contribute to further the development of it by providing commits on their main GitHub. So, we can all be a part of the team, more or less...

Final review about Utopian:

I’ve been on Steem for around one year, I hadn’t done much research about the Utopian project and used this post to do it. So far, I’m loving it! And I might use it in the future.

The project is really good, it’s futuristic, it’s helpful, it already has a huge community around it, many of the people working on it want what is best, not only for the space but also for the future of our species, open source and decentralization are the future of humanity, at least in my opinion.

I do have one problem at the moment with Utopian… The lack of funding! Which isn’t their fault but the communities fault.

As I said, they are currently doing an Indiegogo fundraiser, which intends to raise $35,000. So far they only gathered around 3,000$… Which isn’t a lot! They need more, they only have 15 days to go and they aren’t even near the goal! They need more money, and that money should and must come from the STEEM community!

There are whales earning thousands per day just delegating their SP to the different projects around STEEM, I’m not kidding, I’ve done the math, It’s literally thousands per day, they should be able to fund the Indiegogo in a couple of days if they wanted to…

And no, I don’t think whales should be the only ones to fund the project, especially since the project will help us all! Because remember, if successful the project will increase the price of STEEM by a lot. At the moment I can’t help, but in a couple of days, I’ll send the money that I can gather to the Indiegogo campaign.

Now, I’m not one to just shill projects trying to suck upvotes out of people, I use STEEM mainly to push myself to research and grow my own knowledge, and so, I try to be as unbiased as I can, I hate tribe-like crypto mentality, so I’ll talk about another similar project to Utopian, but on EOS and where I see both projects going in the future.

Nougit!

Nougit is a project that aims to build a decentralized monetized GitHub on top of EOS. The team first presented the EOS community with the Nougit idea during the San Francisco EOS hackathon. This project won first place in that hackathon and got 100.000$ fund from block.one. That hackathon had VC from all over the world that bombarded the team with questions over and over.

Nougit is also going to be launched in 2019 Q2 and a person can already claim their name and project on their website.
_.

Team

It was hard to find the team, there was no "team" page on their website, maybe due to the fact that the project is still only 5 months old. Although, through reading a lot, and I mean A LOT of medium posts about the project I was able to find the team.

All-in-all it's just a normal team with previous knowledge of the crypto space.

Pros vs Cons

Utopian has a huge headstart and a bigger community backing it up. It already has use-cases and it's widely known inside the STEEM community. The team is really solid, full of entrepreneurs with a track record of going beyond their reach to develop and bettering the world. Although they do have all of this, they lack the necessary funding, just like we can see with their Indiegogo fundraiser.

Nougit has the funding from block.one but lacks the community already around it, the team is not the worse but, in my honest opinion, the Utopian team is better. So far there is not enough information to really paint a picture of what they are trying to do, it's just a project being worked on. This will change in the coming months and we will have to wait for it to happen to have an idea of what Nougit might become.

As we can see both projects have goods and bads, I would say Utopian is far far ahead of the race, maybe Nougit can catch up to it... but wait, is it really a race?

Competitors?

I don't see them as competitors. Open source is all about community unison. Maybe commercial products have competitors, for example, the competition between Microsoft and Apple, but open source shouldn't be about competition. In my opinion, both projects have a place in this new open source decentralized world. I hope that we can get some ideas to make both Utopian and Nougit work together. Who knows, maybe STEEM can have cross-chain interoperability with EOS and decentralize the open source decentralized repositories! Being rewarded in both EOS and STEEM would, in the end, be worth a lot more than being rewarded in just EOS or just STEEM, decentralizing investments and blockchains, while also connecting them, even more, should be our aim. It makes it more censorship proof.

Additional info:

Utopian Indiegogo fundaraiser
Utopian Guidelines
Utopian Github
Nougit website
Nougit Hackathon video

Images Free Source - 1, 2,3,4,5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 - Tradingview snapshots too.

Question of the day: Do you know of any other projects on other blockchains aiming to do what both of these projects are doing?

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