# Exploring Resilience in Open Source Software Ecosystems

# Abstract
Open source software and the communities that form around it are a relatively recent phenomenon, yet understanding their dynamics is necessary to build a long-term foundation for credibly neutral blockchains like Ethereum. There are many lessons one can draw from open source ecosystems to avoid common failure — and capture — modes. More so, the social, financial, and political histories of open source ecosystems provide a glimpse into the consequences that can arise from centralization, privatization, and intermediation.

# Overview
This research will explore aspects of capture-resistance, resilience, and neutrality in software ecosystems by analyzing the past, current, and future of major open source projects. It will center on ethnographic research and user interviews with key stakeholders to present a multi-dimensional image of how these projects have evolved through forks, privatization, capture, and censorship through the lens of their social, political, and financial networks.

These insights will be used to define a more context-specific framework of "resilience" that can be applied to open source infrastructure ecosystems. This framework will be used to map the current social, political, and financial landscape behind the Ethereum project, in an attempt to enframe our own ecosystem within the histories of others.

# Background

“Decentralized” does not always guarantee a effective and equitable distribution of power. A system can be technically decentralized yet still fail to eliminate excessive concentrations of power. This can make a system more vulnerable to capture & censorship which challenges the credible neutrality of open source infrastructure and thus compromises its long-term viability due to the nature of the anti-competitive forces that aim to control it ([1](https://berjon.com/capture-resistance/)). Conceptually, "resilience" is a way to represent a more holistic picture of decentralization, one that takes into account the social, financial, and political aspects of the ecosystem. A project's resilience determines how it can adapt, evolve, and survive in the face of intermediation, privitization, and censorship.

While we've seen the emergence of decentralization metrics like the [Nakamoto Coefficient](https://www.researchhub.com/post/505/quantifying-ethereum-network-decentralization) and ["sufficent decentralization"](https://variant.fund/articles/sufficient-decentralization/), we still lack a more defined picture for what level of "resilience" is necessary to maintain the long-term credible neutrality, reliability, and viability of blockchain ecosystems like Ethereum.

This research aims to further define the concept of "resilience" with ethnographic research and case studies from well-known open source projects.

## Team
[**Abbey Titcomb**](https://twitter.com/abbey_titcomb) is Governance Lead at [Radicle](https://radicle.xyz/), where her prerogative is to design the organization as a decentralized, community-led, self-sustaining network for funding free and open source technologies. She sits on the Council of the [Radicle Foundation](http://radicle.ch/) and the Board of the Optimism Foundation, where she helps steward the formation & growth of the [Optimism](https://www.optimism.io/) Collective.

[**Jenny Pollack**](https://twitter.com/jenny_pollack) is a long-time Ethereum community member who has occupied many roles in the space, including as the Head of Product at [Aave](https://aave.com/), Security Researcher at [DappHub](https://dapp.tools/), and Software Engineer at [MetaMask](https://metamask.io/).

# Grant Scope

## Research Questions
- Within open source software ecosystems, how is capture-resistance, resilience, and neutrality defined in practice?
- What has been the impact of intermediation and privatization on major open source software ecosystems? What examples of capture have we seen in the real-world?
- What structures/fortifications are employed by open source software ecosystems to ensure capture-resistance, resilience, and neutrality?
## Objectives
This initial round of research will focus on the following objectives:

- Conduct a series of research interviews with key stakeholders (e.g. maintainers, executive directors, community leaders) of major open source ecosystems.
- Present a preliminary evaluation of the impact of intermediation, privatisation, and other forms of capture in those open source ecosystems backed by real-world examples and case studies.
- Map the social, finanical, and political networking behind the Ethereum client ecosystem (e.g. client teams, core devs, entities, capital flows) building on current resources like [clientdiversity.org](https://clientdiversity.org/).
- Delineate a framework of "resilience" that can be applied within open source ecosystems.
## Methodology
### Research & Interviews

We'll conduct a series of interviews with key stakeholders from target open source ecosystems that:

- Exhibit varying degrees of "resiliency" based on differing technical, financial, and social/political decentralization needs.
- Have experienced significant attempts at capture, intermediation, and/or privatization.
- Deploy “fortifications” for ensuring capture-resistance & credible neutrality.

We will also review documents and artifacts that detail different examples of capture, contextualize the motivations behind them, and evaluate the impact they've had on the associated ecosystem(s).

These subjects/case studies include, but are not limited to:

- Tor
- Rust
- W3C
- The "Browser Wars" (Firefox, Brave, WebKit vs. KHTML)
- Amazon (DocumentDB vs MongoDB)

We will also include a set of interviews with key individuals like, but not limited to:

- Robin Berjon (W3C/Filecoin)
- Ashley Williams (Rust)
- Jay Graber (Bluesky)
- Meredith Whittaker (Signal Foundation)

The goal of these interviews is to inform "a spectrum of resilience" by providing examples of how different open source ecosystems have been impacted by capture, intermediation, and privatization. This will provide generalized historic context that can be applied to other open source ecosystems, including Ethereum.

### Case Study

Building on the ethnographic research, we'll build a case study on Ethereum that evaluates its own "resilience" using the following methods:

- Consolidating & reviewing evaluations of Ethereum's current technical decentralization (e.g. client diversity, geopolitical mapping of validators, hosting diversity etc...).
- Mapping funding networks behind protocol development (e.g. corporate, institutional, venture etc...).
- Mapping relevant organizational affinities & relationships.

These methods will build on already available resources like [etheralpha.org](https://etheralpha.org/) but add new social and financial context to provide a clearer picture of resilience within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This research may also include user interviews with key stakeholders in the Ethereum ecosystem (e.g. maintainers, client teams, node operators etc...)

## Timeline
The research will be conducted over the course of 6 months, scoped in three two-month phases:

**Phase 1: Background Development**
* *Duration:* Two months
* *Scope:* Background research, scoping target subjects, development of guiding hypotheses, creation of interview protocols.

**Phase 2: Research & Interviews**
* *Duration:* Two months
* *Scope:* Conduct interviews, review and categorize responses, develop initial framework for resilience spectrum.

**Phase 3: Synthesis**
* *Duration:* Two months
* *Scope:* Refine resilience spectrum framework, analyze findings, complete written deliverable, website and graphics development, submit speaker applications for live presentations.

### Deliverables

The current planned deliverables are:
* A static site for displaying research results.
* An accompanying written piece detailing the research completed and conclusions made.

## Budget

| Type | Description | Cost (USDC) |
| ------ | ----------- | --------- |
| Principal Researchers | Two researchers at 5hrs/week over the duration of research period (6 months) | $36k
| Technical Deliverable Development | Infographic & graph designs, site development, hosting | $3k
| Additional Costs | Travel expenses for 1-2 in-person sessions for principal researchers, external editing/review costs | $3k
| **Total Costs** | | **$42k**