Over the last few months as I have dug into the EOS project I have gone from jaded skeptic to passionate supporter and full time evangelist.
But why?
Even with some of the remaining issues in the project and all the red flags so many bring up, the power of the actual technology Dan Larimer is about to unleash upon the world is at least 3-4 years ahead of any other blockchain project currently on the market, with Steemit close behind.
And it's all open source.
Why Open Source Matters
Some of you in the community don't fully understand what that really means.
I think to most people who do not code when you say something is "Open Source" that just means the code is openly available on Github and they don't have to pay a license fee to use it.
That's part of it, but it's much more than that.
Every so often, every decade or so - there is a big shift in technology.
When developers and companies choose to open source otherwise advanced technology of the day and service the businesses who use it rather than extracted license fees, they create new economies and further establish their own market dominance as leaders in the ecosystem.
The Shift From Web 1.0 to 2.0
These kinds of major shifts are often born from a small community of developers working on a common problem at the intersection of passion, community and the interest of public good.
Think back to the late 90s and early 2000s, pre web standards.
It sucked.
BAD.
It was really time consuming and tedious to do simple things. I personally hated my professional life during that era and dreaded slaving long hours to do things I can do now with just a few command lines.
Editing thousands of lines of procedural inline code that resembled spaghetti more than the semantic, human readable expressive syntax we are use to in modern websites and apps today (although Google Pagespeed is screwing all that up again if you like clean, structured front end code).
The only way to edit a website for the average plebe was a serious undertaking, especially if the site had any scale.
This kept the more prominent early web adopters in a rich get richer scenario and the barrier to entry was high in time or money (and often both).
If that website was really large with a lot of content, you had to result to PHP and a mix of iframes to scale editing areas of the site into various sections. Home brewed blogging tools were the flavor of the day and prone to getting hacked pretty easily.
Let's not even get into the browser wars either. Many years of my life were lost in that battle.
Enter B2 and the Evolution of Wordpress
Around that same time, in early 2003, a rag tag group of self taught web design enthusiast, web application and software engineers changed everything.
Based on the b2 code base Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little set out to create a better blogging engine than was available at the time.
That open source software, Wordpress, changed the face of the web forever in ways that people who are not old enough to have known the web prior to Wordpress can fully comprehend.
There were many other projects around at that time attempting to solve the same problem (Joomla, Drupal, etc...) but ultimately they failed to capture the market dominance that Wordpress has been able to achieve.
Current day WordPress is used to power over 25% of the world's ten million largest websites and over 59% of all websites using a CMS.
When Technology and Community Converge (Great Things Happen)
It's not a big surprise Wordpress took over market share if you were active in various CMS communities.
They were able to do it because of three simple things:
- Community
- Ease of Use
- Purpose
If you were around in those early days, you would have noticed that what differentiated the Wordpress community was the passion people had to share their stories on the web.
They believed that the web was a place for ideas and that the more they could enable that, the more open and prosperous society as a whole would be.
In large part, they were right, but the centralized nature and diminishing returns of the advertising model for creators and writers to make enough money to support their passions was only realized fully by those who were early adopters.
It is important to note there were also robust proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS) at that time that were far more advanced - but extremely expensive.
The code was not open source and parts were often encrypted, so you had to hire the company that developed the software to make even relatively small changes. Developers experienced enough to create a CMS for you were scarce and could be even more expensive than just buying a license to an exiting CMS.
The constraints of the early web and the eventual evolution of web based languages and related technology reminds me a lot of the current blockchain ecosystem.
We are at the crossroads of a similar paradigm shift today and I believe EOS and Steemit will change the web and the world in the same way.
Embrace The Future, Forgive The Past
There has been an unhealthy tone between the EOS and Steemit communities since 
The purpose of this article is not to take a side, but to bring the real opportunity ahead of both of these communities to light.
To use the CMS market as an example, the people who founded Drupal and Acquia (the company who services Drupal website hosting & development for large companies) are worth over $150 million dollars today.
That number will probably double before the CMS market significantly wanes in the next 5-7 years.
My point is, there is more than enough to go around. Everyone involved in these early days will realize their dreams and live the life they always wanted.
Don't let the battle of the day distract you from the larger war of corruption, centralization and irresponsible capitalism we are all fighting against.
Whether you are a die hard Steemian or an EOSomniac, you should see yourselves as brothers in arms.
We are all fighting for a better world.
The only thing that will live on from any of this is the ideas and people we helped.
So let's focus on that.
Life is short.