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by brolumir 1583 days ago
What's missing from the open source model is the monetization. The incentives for contributing to open source and using open source products are misaligned - this is why it's been so hard to build businesses around it (with some notable exceptions).

What he's arguing is that web3 solves this problem by aligning incentives for creators and maintainers around the same token system.

2 comments

I disagree. Monetization will ruin open source. The incentives w/o monetization are actually well aligned: the contributors are often the most avid users - whether private or commercial. Adding money into the mix will invite participants whose only interest is earning tokens.

This will probably mean that more OSS code gets written, but - as with the open web - financial incentives will invite bad actors to game the system and the signal to noise ratio in OSS contributions will decrease.

A good case study in this is what happened when Steam tried to add monetization to Skyrim mods[1].

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements...

why there needs to be a blockchain involved for this tho? Hard problem is who should pay for what work which a blockchain is not solving
> Hard problem is who should pay for what work which a blockchain is not solving

Yes, this is one of the many hard problems.

I would be 100% behind MA if he used his influence, wealth and power to fund solving these hard problems.

Unfortunately, his and most of current funds are building Managed Blockchains that's just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)

That said, Decentralization is the future and will happen with or without him. Unfortunately he's going down in history as one of those who slowed down progress to make monetary gains.

Because you can offload much of the logistic behind it onto the chain. Otherwise you need a legal entity willing to work with banks and auditors. It's what gitcoin does.