TechFlow news, on March 29, Vitalik published an article titled "We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding," pointing out that the term "public goods" has a century-long history. In digital ecosystems, especially decentralized digital ecosystems, public goods are extremely important—on average, the kind of goods people might want to produce are public goods; open-source software, academic research on cryptography and blockchain protocols, publicly available educational resources, and more, all fall into this category.
Vitalik argues that we should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding. Shifting focus from "public goods" to "open source" appears to be the better approach. Open source should not imply that "building anything as long as it's open-sourced is equally noble"; rather, it should center on building and open-sourcing things that are most valuable to humanity. However, distinguishing which projects deserve support and which do not has already been widely recognized as the primary task of public goods funding mechanisms.
