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Do the naysayers have any actual points as to why this is a bad idea, or is it just another instance where people see the word "blockchain" and immediately star

by hbn 5y ago

Do the naysayers have any actual points as to why this is a bad idea, or is it just another instance where people see the word "blockchain" and immediately start calling it bad and high-fiving each other? It seems they're going to be releasing a whitepaper. I'm willing to hear out ideas for how OSS developers could be compensated, especially if it's coming from someone who has already created a successful and well-loved project from scratch.

and0 5y ago
All for compensating OSS devs, and doing so automatically and implicitly via contributors and the packages they built on is a neat idea. But the blockchain. Ugh. Going by the owner's blog, which is a bit more in-depth on his reasoning and less hyperbolic: - Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents) Don't need blockchain for this. Just add a ToS that you can't pull packages from the centralized repo. - Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage) NPM availability hasn't been an issue, but could be. Blockchain still not needed for decentralization. Anyone who has to download the entire chain... yeesh, gonna be huge. Scaling issue greater than NPM or Github in my opinion. - Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust) Doesn't seem to be an issue with NPM? When this happens they usually hijack an account or the github. Some sort of token to sign with can also be grabbed, especially shared between maintainers or (inevitably, because no one actually enjoys decentralization) just becomes an automated feature of Github etc. Even then this issue is solvable with NPM, don't need a blockchain to sign releases. - Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution Don't need a blockchain. I've thought of building these myself for NPM, maybe something to check VCS release tag hash vs package. - Token can flow through the graph (this is re: financing devs) Don't need a blockchain for this, though my inner dev likes the automation.
phphphphp 5y ago
As far as I can understand, the project distributes and measures open-source software usage in order to collect revenue on behalf of the authors. I don’t necessarily think that’s a terrible idea but I can’t even begin to imagine why it needs a blockchain or what a blockchain could offer that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. I release my software as open-source because I am happy for people to use it for free, I don’t fully understand what problem this is solving — most open-source software usage is so widespread because it’s free, the problem is not that there’s no way to charge companies for usage — but it’ll be interesting to see how they set about doing this.

by hbn 5y ago

and0 5y ago

All for compensating OSS devs, and doing so automatically and implicitly via contributors and the packages they built on is a neat idea. But the blockchain. Ugh. Going by the owner's blog, which is a bit more in-depth on his reasoning and less hyperbolic: - Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents) Don't need blockchain for this. Just add a ToS that you can't pull packages from the centralized repo. - Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage) NPM availability hasn't been an issue, but could be. Blockchain still not needed for decentralization. Anyone who has to download the entire chain... yeesh, gonna be huge. Scaling issue greater than NPM or Github in my opinion. - Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust) Doesn't seem to be an issue with NPM? When this happens they usually hijack an account or the github. Some sort of token to sign with can also be grabbed, especially shared between maintainers or (inevitably, because no one actually enjoys decentralization) just becomes an automated feature of Github etc. Even then this issue is solvable with NPM, don't need a blockchain to sign releases. - Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution Don't need a blockchain. I've thought of building these myself for NPM, maybe something to check VCS release tag hash vs package. - Token can flow through the graph (this is re: financing devs) Don't need a blockchain for this, though my inner dev likes the automation.

phphphphp 5y ago

As far as I can understand, the project distributes and measures open-source software usage in order to collect revenue on behalf of the authors. I don’t necessarily think that’s a terrible idea but I can’t even begin to imagine why it needs a blockchain or what a blockchain could offer that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. I release my software as open-source because I am happy for people to use it for free, I don’t fully understand what problem this is solving — most open-source software usage is so widespread because it’s free, the problem is not that there’s no way to charge companies for usage — but it’ll be interesting to see how they set about doing this.