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The idea of creating a bounty system for open source projects is one that has been tried many times over the last decade+. These bounty systems never gain much
by carterthecook 3y ago
The idea of creating a bounty system for open source projects is one that has been tried many times over the last decade+. These bounty systems never gain much traction because the incentive structure/economics don't work. The closest we'll get to these bounty systems are for-profit open source software companies, which is pretty good considering that there's a VC-backed open source company for almost any software category you can imagine.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI find your leap from "they haven't gotten the economics right yet" to "the status quo is the only way" concerning. Being VC backed means accepting an additional constraint: it has to be remotely controllable by a third party, and if the user revokes trust in that third party, it has to become useless. Otherwise there's nothing to own, nothing to leverage for a return on your investment. That places some pretty severe limits on how trustworthy such a piece of software can be. There's tremendous value in getting the economics right, even if we haven't yet.