729 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 17 Nov 2023 freebie \ on: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software is Unsustainable bitcoin
Also: sorry to front-run HN bot, but this is a topic of particular interest to me.
Haha, no worries! @hn is a news provider of last resort :) also, the story hasn't hit #1 on yet (it's #5 atm) and maybe it won't ever, so maybe @hn wouldn't have posted this anyway.
Now to the topic:
I've read some comments on HN mentioning the friction for donations and how Github sponsors makes it so easy.
SN has a ticket to pay upstream according (or used to have? I can't find it right now) to the "significance".
I wonder if OSS donations via BTC could become a trojan horse? If you complain about not getting funded, would you complain about the currency? Or would you start to get interested? I think if we have more and more "conflict of interests" like this (people who think BTC bad but they have problem X where BTC might be a solution), adoption will grow.
For example, I've already seen some projects include addresses from various coins in the output of npm install. They are still outliers however.
I would love to see more P2P donations. If you need an organization, that just adds more friction even though the organization is there to decrease friction. But it's still friction compared to the "ideal world".
If I can just put my LN address somewhere where people will see it and they can easily donate, this should already be enough, no? Or a subscription model like Mutiny.
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163 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023
I wonder if OSS donations via BTC could become a trojan horse? If you complain about not getting funded, would you complain about the currency? Or would you start to get interested?
I love this idea. My take is that anything that promotes 'real' use, even if the use only lasts for the handful of minutes that it takes to cash out using Strike or Cash app, is super high leverage, way higher than somebody just buying $100 of btc in case it 10x again someday. The ripples that it sends through the universe, the lines of force that unfold in the ecosystem.
My main thing is not the money but the mental load. Decisions are expensive! I don't have the expertise to evaluate someone's worthiness of a contribution; and it also seems futile, much like some people feel about voting -- does giving $5 to some random dude really matter? And should I allocate to a known star, or to some unknown?
I think this is highly relevant to SN, actually. That's one of the really ripe opportunities for economic analysis.
I think what Chaincode, Brink, Spiral grants, etc., do is really really valuable for this reason. Assess, curate, encourage. But probably not a solution for the broader problem.
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