Hey folks! I’m seeing some confusion around this PTBR, so I want to address a few things:
Concern 1: Perceived Overlap in Deliverables
The Generation Software budget is based on deliverables, not time. The timeline provided is our expected delivery date for each piece of work, but if those dates aren’t met we will still work to ship those pieces.
This is in contrast to the PT Inc Q2 budget, which was a budget for one quarter of time for the team. The PT Inc milestones were given to illustrate what we’d be working on. It’s written quite plainly: “Dates given are estimates, not hard commitments. We’ll do our best.”. PT Inc reprioritized its work, and even with the new timeline it will be meeting its goals, albeit in a different order.
GS is committed to delivering what we have outlined; this is much more concrete than how PT Inc operated in the past. We are making the deliverables explicit!
Concern 2: The Size of the Budget
Some have expressed concerns about the budget size; but this is the true cost of a high-tech R&D team. PT Inc shouldered the bulk of their costs, which is why the community hasn’t seen budgets like this before.
Budgets of this size are very normal. As an example you can see the Bored Ghosts Developing Labs company applying for funding from Aave in this request. Their proposal is structured differently, but at the end of the day they’re asking for $8m USD for 15 months of development.
Intellectual Property
While no one has expressed this concern, I feel it’s necessary to highlight it because I want expectations to match what we’ll deliver.
Generation Software will retain ownership of all intellectual property it generates, whether code, graphics, tokens etc. However, the deliverables outlined above will be open-sourced so that the community (and everyone else) has the freedom to use it as they please.
PoolTogether does not have a legal entity so it is unable to hold any IP; by making the deliverables open-source we ensure that the community can do what they want with the code. We’ve been using the GPL-3 license so far, but we might want to explore the MIT license to make it even more accessible.
Next Steps
I think I’ve answered any of the outstanding questions, and Leighton has summarized the state of PT Inc very well. I’m happy to answer any more questions here or in Discord.
Today we’re going to continue discussing PTBRs on the Council call, I’ll post any updates here. Otherwise, I expect we’ll be going to vote shortly.