Hi everyone! My name is Eric Berry. I’m a long-time software developer and OSS sustainability advocate. You might know me as the founder of Code Sponsor, a platform built to provide funding for open source through one line of code.
Hi everyone! My name is Eric Berry. I’m a long-time software developer and OSS sustainability advocate. You might know me as the founder of Code Sponsor, a platform built to provide funding for open source through one line of code.
Thanks to a tweet last year by Tomás Aparicio, I had the great pleasure to discover Gitcoin. During the exact moment I saw his tweet, I was contemplating how to manage payments to over 8 different countries. Cryptocurrency seemed an obv
ious choice. That day marked the beginning of a four month courtship between Kevin Owocki, CEO of Gitcoin, and myself.
Since our first discussion in October, Kevin and I found that our company and personal goals are very similar. We both wanted to help grow the open source ecosystem by providing means for developers to generate paths of sustainability. Here’s an interview I did with Kevin discussing open source sustainability.
Finding solutions to help sustain open source has become a passion of mine. Code Sponsor itself has helped generate over $10,000 in revenue for developers through the platform.
On December 8, I decided to shut down the platform due to compliance issues with GitHub. Since then, my great friends Freddy Shelton and Mike Smith with Rollbar have kept the flame alive through direct sponsorships.Why Funding Open Source is Hard
tl;dr: Either developers need to change, or GitHub needs to changehackernoon.com
During that period of time, I began to learn more and more about the blockchain and the potential impact it could have on OSS sustainability.
I’m extremely excited to announce that I have joined the Gitcoin + Bounties Network family as the Open Source Sustainability Lead. This new position allows me to work on Code Sponsor nearly full-time and continue to find and provide ways to sustain open source.
Simultaneously, I will venture into the world of blockchain as an employee of ConsenSys. The company has fully embraced decentralization, where spokes (like Gitcoin) are autonomous, yet supported by the ConsenSys Mesh.
I look forward to serving the developer community and bringing the blockchain technology into OSS funding!
Feel free to follow me on Twitter either @coderberry or at @codesponsor.
Thanks to Vivek Singh and Kevin Owocki.