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It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure C

It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated. The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.

javajosh 4y ago
There exist grant programs at most institutions designed to support such work and precisely for that reason. Sadly, writing grant applications are a job in-and-of-themselves. Consider the case of Justine Tunney, the creator of redbean. If anyone deserves a grant or three, it's her. But she's too busy making cool shit to a) research which grants are available, and b) satisfy their onerous application requirements. Obviously the problem is that those in charge of giving away money are very passive, and in fact put up large barriers (the onerous application process) for anyone wanting the money. This, to me, is absurd. The admins of such a fund should themselves be active in one or more areas of interest, such that they themselves should be approaching people like Justine and telling her, "Here, please take my money." I don't know much about grants, but like most things that are broken I suspect there are perverse incentives here. For example, someone is probably investing that grant money, and if they give it away the money leaves the market, and that will make the admins sad. (I don't know if that's the case, but that's the kind of thing I would expect to see.) Oh, another surprisingly effective thing people are doing are subscriptions to people you like. You see this particularly on twitch, and sometimes on youtube. People can and will give money to the creators they like! It's kind of amazing to me. I suppose the analog for people like Justine is Patreon. It's fascinating though that people will happily subscribe to an entertaining personality, but will happily ignore someone who toils at making incredible things behind closed doors (but still use their tools). The obvious solution is that all open source projects should become a source of entertainment.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Yep, you have outlined the problems with grants. As they look forward, and due so in a one-time lump sum, they hold considerable risk, and thus the providers of the grant money need to ensure they pick correctly, but this just leaves us with a centrally controlled economy and bureaucratic nightmare. Instead, you should seek to discover the intrinsic value as it is occurring, and therefore no risk to the granters. I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed. In this modified system, the top 90%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner. A certain subset users of the Open Source software are asked to give their true value for some sub-set of open source products as they use it and using statistics we could extrapolate that to the rest of the population. We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    > a modified Vickrey auction So, fund people based on github stars. I could think of worse solutions, honestly! Oh, something else I remembered: Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study! This is an interesting idea. Basically they tell a scientist "You've changed human history, the least we can do is give you an income for the rest of your life that has no strings attached. You can teach, or not, research, or not." It would be cool if each of FAANG had one, or they pooled together to make one, or had a virtual distributed version. "Dear Fabrice Bellard, we will be depositing 10k euros a month into your account until you die. Yours, Google."
    - hrbf 4y ago
      Given that I have a GitHub repository with 26k+ stars, what do you think an equivalent amount of money per month that should work out to?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elcomet 4y ago
This assumes an infinite number or clients. I don't agree with this. If the marginal cost is zero, the proper price is definitely not zero.

javajosh 4y ago

There exist grant programs at most institutions designed to support such work and precisely for that reason. Sadly, writing grant applications are a job in-and-of-themselves. Consider the case of Justine Tunney, the creator of redbean. If anyone deserves a grant or three, it's her. But she's too busy making cool shit to a) research which grants are available, and b) satisfy their onerous application requirements. Obviously the problem is that those in charge of giving away money are very passive, and in fact put up large barriers (the onerous application process) for anyone wanting the money. This, to me, is absurd. The admins of such a fund should themselves be active in one or more areas of interest, such that they themselves should be approaching people like Justine and telling her, "Here, please take my money." I don't know much about grants, but like most things that are broken I suspect there are perverse incentives here. For example, someone is probably investing that grant money, and if they give it away the money leaves the market, and that will make the admins sad. (I don't know if that's the case, but that's the kind of thing I would expect to see.) Oh, another surprisingly effective thing people are doing are subscriptions to people you like. You see this particularly on twitch, and sometimes on youtube. People can and will give money to the creators they like! It's kind of amazing to me. I suppose the analog for people like Justine is Patreon. It's fascinating though that people will happily subscribe to an entertaining personality, but will happily ignore someone who toils at making incredible things behind closed doors (but still use their tools). The obvious solution is that all open source projects should become a source of entertainment.

ItsMonkk 4y ago
Yep, you have outlined the problems with grants. As they look forward, and due so in a one-time lump sum, they hold considerable risk, and thus the providers of the grant money need to ensure they pick correctly, but this just leaves us with a centrally controlled economy and bureaucratic nightmare. Instead, you should seek to discover the intrinsic value as it is occurring, and therefore no risk to the granters. I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed. In this modified system, the top 90%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner. A certain subset users of the Open Source software are asked to give their true value for some sub-set of open source products as they use it and using statistics we could extrapolate that to the rest of the population. We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.
- javajosh 4y ago
  > a modified Vickrey auction So, fund people based on github stars. I could think of worse solutions, honestly! Oh, something else I remembered: Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study! This is an interesting idea. Basically they tell a scientist "You've changed human history, the least we can do is give you an income for the rest of your life that has no strings attached. You can teach, or not, research, or not." It would be cool if each of FAANG had one, or they pooled together to make one, or had a virtual distributed version. "Dear Fabrice Bellard, we will be depositing 10k euros a month into your account until you die. Yours, Google."
  - hrbf 4y ago
    Given that I have a GitHub repository with 26k+ stars, what do you think an equivalent amount of money per month that should work out to?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

elcomet 4y ago

This assumes an infinite number or clients. I don't agree with this. If the marginal cost is zero, the proper price is definitely not zero.