UN Open Source Conference 2025 Insights. I wrote a report reflecting on how open source shapes digital sovereignty, public infrastructure, and global equity. Here’s a quick preview ↴

Come Black Friday this year we will see how product prices will unfold, the quality for goods (are you paying more for inferior goods), and business closure rates, especially if consumers have less to spend!.

→ Increased health and environmental risks: We will have more exposure to microplastics, toxic dyes, and harmful synthetic fabrics, which will lead to polluting our waterways, harming wildlife, and damaging ecosystems.

→ Higher retail prices: Consumers will end up paying the full tariff cost. → Cheaper manufacturing inputs: Expect a shift from cotton to synthetic materials like polyester or other cheap synthetics.

As I noted in my Fast Fashion Is a Scam blog post, I expect clothing merchandise companies will not switch to alternative sourcing. Instead, they’ll keep importing from China but cut costs by altering material content:.

Do you hire, freeze, or fire? Change product launches? Cut costs in R&D? Simplify operational costs? Which business units will suffer to retain margins? And time is money…every delay bleeds cash.

For many of these hardware and manufacturing SMB importing from several countries, over the past 3 months, their tariff rates have gone from 0% then 50% to 20% to 15%. Super volatile rates that would be difficult to make long term investment and business decisions with.

Some protected US companies have also raised prices despite tariff protection (NVIDIA, Apple, etc). This puts small hardware startups and manufacturing businesses at a severe disadvantage.

I’ve already heard of a few small businesses that have ceased operations either because: .→ The initial absorption costs proved too much to sustain .→ The necessary price increases to consumers rendered them uncompetitive .→ Operational costs became unmanageable.

Also some believe that the current amount absorbed by exporters and corporations has peaked which means it’ll only be a matter of time for US consumers to bear the majority of the tariff costs.

Industry comments suggest that businesses' immediate decisions have been to absorb most of the cost while they wait and see what happens with Trumps tariff rates.

Recent tariff data shows (Goldman Sachs): .→ Foreign exporters absorbed 14% of U.S. tariffs .→ U.S. companies absorbed 64% .→ U.S. consumers absorbed 22%

"[OSS] projects traditionally lack access to sophisticated financial services that established corporations routinely utilize…. But why should open source projects be excluded from financial mechanisms that could accelerate their growth and sustainability?"

It reminded me of Silicon Valley’s common mindset of “don’t regulate us we will regulate ourselves”. but that usually leads to fractionalizing innovation and sometimes even fueling ego.

Another interesting point Adrienne Harris made at the @ethereum_NYC NextFIN Summit, is that they don’t want to race ahead of innovation, but they also don’t want to fall so far behind that it ends up hurting consumers (think FTX).

A lot of startups see the BitLicense as a tough regulatory hurdle that they have to tackle - but Harris says that needs to be reframed and that its simply a framework for protecting consumers. What do you think?.

Theres a reason why FTX, Celsius, and Voyager crashed and burned. They didn’t qualify for NY’s license.

She said firms with a BitLicense survived because they had to meet strict requirements and consumer safeguards and therefore had the capital expenditures to survive.

At the @ethereum_NYC NextFIN Summit, New York’s Superintendent of the Department of Financial Services, Adrienne Harris, shared why she believes some crypto companies made it through the crypto winter while others didn’t.

love being early.

"Open source supports critical infrastructure but lacks visibility, stable funding, and equitable participation. Yet there is a viable path forward. It requires reframing open source development in terms that resonate with policymakers and the public"