[hn_throwaway_99]

> I see for instance how DAOs and blockchain could help developers receive compensation for commits to open source software, creating a possibility for the commercialisation of open source that competes with even large companies. I know people who looked into this. And I hope it happens.

I was appropriately reprimanded by dang yesterday for starting a comment with an attack, so I'll slow down and just point out the following:

1. GitHub, for example, already makes it extremely easy to contribute to open source developers. It's called GitHub Sponsors.

2. I have actually donated to a developer that writes a library I love using GitHub Sponsors. It was trivial to do, I just entered my credit card, the money came out on a monthly basis, and I cancelled after a year (I told the dev I'd support them for a year). I'll also note that I don't live in the same country as the developer and the developer's country uses a different currency.

3. The thing that gets me about these kinds of examples proposed by crypto fans is that the mechanics of how to, for example, pay open source devs is zero part of the problem. The problem is that a lot of people are willing to work for free, and software users don't like to pay for stuff that they can get for free.

Again, I see a lot of "hand-wavy utopianism" from crypto enthusiasts, but I see zero examples of (a) why this would be better than GitHub Sponsors, or (b) why do you think GitHub Sponsors hasn't been more successful (hint, it's not that actually making payment with a GH Sponsorship is difficult).

[kranke155]

I’ve gotten some flak from dang as well ;) happens sometimes

I think we are describing fundamentally different economies. GitHub Sponsors is optional. I’m talking about a way to have mandatory payments in open-source, with fully transparent automatic payment mechanisms to all contributors.

And before you say well how, MakerDAO is kind of already working like this (I’d have to look into it more but that’s my impression).

Imagine you buy a piece of software - and it costs you 20$. It’s open source but when you buy it you get an NFT that lets you run the software. The commit tree and their importance are valued by the community. And when you buy the software everyone who’s contributed gets a piece. If you add or extend to it, you’ll also get a share, or you can sell your modules on the side and make your own money on top. But using the blockchain as a method of developer verification, open source becomes profitable in a way that’s verifiable, decentralised and permission less. Anyone can fork but whatever much of the software youve re used still goes to the original developers.

I’m talking about full open source software that would always be paid, where the devs would be IDed on chain, where anyone could write new modules for and get paid on chain for their contributions. All of this is not crypto Utopianism - again some DAOs are already there or close.

Im not talking about “hey sponsor this dev”. I’m talking about a way to earn money while keeping software open source and rewarding people for expanding it in a completely novel way. This is already partially true, even if my whole vision at the moment is a bit fuzzy, it would solve a major challenge that I think we have now.

I am a bit sleepy so I wonder if my comment will make sense but I hope it does.

But fundamentally I believe MakerDAO already does this, it’s just a web app and you pay to use it. Part of that revenue goes to Ethereum miners/stakers, some goes to the protocol, and the protocol decides who to reward.

I don’t see why that model wouldn’t work for a lot of other things. Essentially with crypto VMs you can enforce a model that A. Is open source B. Rewards contributors financially.

Asking why this is better than GitHub Sponsors is a bit like asking why people didn’t pay for digital art before NFTs. It’s just fundamentally different imo.

[hn_throwaway_99]

There is a lot going on here, but I'll just say I don't see any benefit in reality:

1. "It’s open source but when you buy it you get an NFT that lets you run the software." You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what open source software is. If you need to buy some sort of NFT to run your software, it's not open source, and this goes against pretty much every definition of open source I've ever seen. You're free to sell your own software now, just don't call it open source if it can't be modified and run independently.

2. "But using the blockchain as a method of developer verification, open source becomes profitable in a way that’s verifiable, decentralised and permission less." This is another pet peeve of mine, when crypto enthusiasts rediscover cryptographic principles that have already been in use for decades and decide by calling it "blockchain" that it is something novel. We have a very nice, cryptographically secure method to verify the commit history of any open source software. It's called git and it's been in use for about 2 decades now.

Again, all I really see is a rube-goldberg machine trying to solve a problem that is fundamentally not about difficulty of existing payment systems.

[kranke155]

I agree with you. Of course you could have a GitHub Sponsors that would work fundamentally similar to a DAO. Then the question is - why do you think it doesn’t?

Data immutability and decentralisation helps this use case from my point of view for a very simple reason - because if you’re a developer it means no one can in the future just remove you from the list of people who will get money for contributing code in the past, and that users/community can determine to approve your contributions to the repo instead of some centralise core team, who may or may not decide to let you reap the rewards of the repo.

If your code is being used, you get paid period. The community gets to vote on who gets paid for what, certainly, and you can easily prioritise features in the roadmap by just letting people place their tokens/rewards on certain features and let developers figure it out.

Maybe the NFT idea is pretty silly. Actually what I should have said is - MakerDAO already built this and I can see it being applied to other pieces of software. The system works, so far. Users get tokens, they use those tokens to reward developers for their work, they can ask developers to prioritise a feature by pooling their tokens as a reward, any developer, core team or not, who solves that feature gets paid, and any significant contribution as determined by the community gets to reap protocol rewards for a while.

Look at the synergy you can have between the users and developers, and look how it’s all being done in a fully decentralised and permission less way. Anyone can contribute, users pay for features, and everyone reaps protocol rewards for as long as its used. Could GitHub sponsors do that? Maybe. But a DAO might actually be a better way just because it’s trust less.

Now I agree with you it’s Rube Goldberg-y. The thing is blockchain solves trust issues, not tech issues. A DAO with reasonable rules sounds inefficient, but it’s more capable and adaptable than any centralised solution.

I’m not sure why it’s so hard to understand. Basically you are building an open source piece of software where people get paid to contribute, irrelevant of their background, location or previous history. Users get to be in control and developers get to be paid to make open source software. MakerDAO already does this. Again - is this something Sponsors can do? And if it is, then why doesn’t it?

Isn’t the idea that any developer can make a commit to any piece of open source software and get paid for it, not only once but recurrently, far more interesting than our current system of “work for company get paid”? Isn’t it phenomenally more interesting if one could live their life looking around for interesting things to do, fix them, and get rewarded for it?

Let’s imagine two futures and an app that’s just been bought - Figma. Figma is a cool app that people worked on, did a good job and the owners (repo owners essentially) sold to Adobe. The whole software is closed source, the developers got paid per time worked, and only 2/3 people made the decision to sell the repo to Adobe. Lots of devs there might not want to work for Adobe, but did they have a choice? The repo has been acquired and them with it.

Now let’s imagine FigmaDAO. Same piece of software but it’s open source and run by a DAO. One day you get really interested in image manipulation and rendering. You look into the FigmaDAO feature request/reward roadmap and you choose to implement a much needed feature. The community votes to include your work, and you get paid the reward. They also decide that your feature addition is so important that it will earn you 1% of protocol revenue for 10 years. You are now part time benefiting from FigmaDAO. Suddenly you realise there’s another DAO, GimpDAO where you could use your newly acquired skills to build another much needed feature. You move into that community, deliver the feature and… rinse repeat.

On one of these futures, we carry one as we are and companies keep building piles of closed source software. On the other one, developers become free agents who get to contribute to any piece of software at will and get rewarded for it, without having to go through bothersome tech interviews and just building (permissionless), their contributions are recorded in an immutable ledger that no one person in particular can edit (trustless) and they get paid automatically whenever their contributions are used (programmable money).

Which one of these futures sounds more exciting ?