Here’s Naval Ravikant’s response to a question from Tim Ferriss on the meaning of “composable” in the context of crypto and software development:
The beauty is all this is open source. It’s not even APIs anymore. I don’t have to access the very limited APIs that a Twitter might expose and then take away latter on as they famously have done. I can literally connect to the code at any point that I want to.
Then in open source, you only solve each problem once. So if somebody else has built a good version of how to solve a problem, I’ll just reuse that rather than build it again. Maybe I’ll fork it. Maybe I’ll improve it. Maybe I’ll move it to a slightly different system. But at a fundamental level each problem only has to be solved only once.
Composable means it’s like digital Legos where I can just copy a Lego and then build on top of it. The effect to a competitor is like voltron-thing where all of a sudden all the apps in Web 3.0 can team up to make any app needed… Once it’s done, then anybody can copy it and it can be dropped into any new application.
If you look at, for example, games that are going to come out that are Web 3.0 based, they will have entire economies in them… They will be composable so that any piece from any other app could plug into any other app permissionlessly. And so you’re building an edifice. You’re building a civilization or a city of interconnected apps instead of these silos where the data isn’t portable, the code isn’t portable, the user’s aren’t portable.
Of course, there’s a ton going on in the crypto-space with different governance mechanisms for accepting changes to the code and how ownership is intermediated by tokens. I bring all this up, however, because of the enormous headaches the government has in terms of composability — which could be viewed as the fundamental problem of JADC2. Blockchain as a new primitive for computing provides fundamentally new capabilities that will prove critical to national security.
Chris Dixon joins in on composability of Web 3.0:
Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance. It’s this magical thing where, if you get it going there’s this exponential hockey stick. I think one thing one people who aren’t in the tech business underestimate is how dominant open source software is.
Open source software went from a curiosity in the 1990s — I happened to be watching a thing on Microsoft in 1999 about the antitrust case, the word Linux doesn’t come up, it’s all Java. And what actually happened was Linux was the thing that won. 99.9% of code that runs in the world is open source. Every server and data center you talk to, that’s almost all Linux. Your Android phone is Linux. Most of the software on your iPhone is open source. How did open source win? It’s all composability. You only solve a problem once. Once you solve it, go on GitHub and fork it and reuse the code.
What Web 3.0 is doing is taking that level of innovation and applying it to web services in addition to software. The one thing software couldn’t do is run itself. It relied on a company to run it. A lot of the tech industry today is take open source software, add a little bit of proprietary software on top, instantiate it — run it, and charge for the service. That’s great, they provide value and should make money. But the key thing driving underneath is this composability of open source software and now we’re add it to this new area.
Also note that this construct will largely solve the zero trust and software bill of material issues, in addition to alleviating problems in IP and MOSA. But of course blockchain and crypto is very early on. It still has a lot of scalability and response time issues that current systems do not have. And moreover, the vast majority of the defense force structure is legacy so it’s not clear how it would all come together. I see this as a long term issue that the United States cannot afford to miss out on. But the best near term JADC2 solutions seem to be what DARPA is working on in terms of its set of interoperability programs like MINC, DYNAMO, STITCHES, SpaceBCN, etc.
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