PANews reported on March 29 that Vitalik published an article titled "We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding", which pointed out that the term "public goods" has a history of a hundred years. In the digital ecosystem, especially the decentralized digital ecosystem, public goods are extremely important: in fact, there is good reason to suggest that the average good that people might want to produce is a public good. Open source software, academic research on encryption and blockchain protocols, public educational resources, and more are all public goods.
Vitalik believes that we should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding, and shifting the focus from "public goods" to "open source" seems to be the best approach. Open source should not mean "building anything is equally noble as long as it is open source"; it should be about building and open sourcing what is most valuable to humanity. But distinguishing which projects are worth supporting and which are not is already the main task of the public goods funding mechanism, which is well known.
