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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

The best way to monetize an open source project so that the whole community can benefit is by launching a blockchain token and then provide a service around it based on the open source project. Unfortunately, the powers that be won't allow such tokens to succeed. Only scam crypto projects are allowed to succeed.

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If you remove the "launching a blockchain token and then" from your sentence, that describes what we already have with the likes of Red Hat (net income $434 million USD).

So why attach a working idea to a Proof-of-Waste scheme? What would be the added value?

Red Hat was early enough in the fiat monetary ponzi scheme to be able to benefit from its network effects. Nowadays, projects cannot get any traction at all without a blockchain token to incentivize collaboration and create shared financial interests around that project.

Nobody cares about features or quality anymore, it's all about financial schemes; you need to create financial incentives for adoption of the product. The product is secondary, the financial scheme is primary. How do you think SaaS companies manage to convince big corporations to pay to use their services? Kickbacks to corporate employees!!! It's all corrupt. The good thing about crypto is that it's more hidden and it allow the provider to keep their hands clean. The employees of the corporations can buy the token themselves to profit from their own corruption so it's not direct like a kickback and only the employee of the corporation is to blame, not the SaaS provider.

It allows the provider to participate in the corrupt modern economic system whilst not actively bribing people. It allows corporate insiders to bribe themselves without implicating the provider. This effect is already commonplace among big corporations; politicians buy corporate stocks and then pass laws to benefit the companies whose stocks they bought... Crypto just levels the playing field by allowing small players to also participate in this scheme.

I have read your second and third paragraphs and feel very confused. You believe that OSS would be better off with more bribes, more financial scheming, less features, less quality, and in general with more corruption? Because you end up saying that "crypto allows small players to participate in this scheme."

So, no thanks.

> You believe that OSS would be better off with more bribes ...

I agree, but I'm very confused about the original proposal because I think fiat is not good enough for bribes.

Bribes are not suitable for aligning financial incentives because they are illegal (both to solicit and to offer).

On the other hand, if a financial instrument exists which is coupled to a specific economic service, then no solicitation or offering step is necessary in order to align incentives between a provider and a supplier.

Also, note that this is not insider trading. Insider trading means that a trade was made after an event occurred but before that event was made public. In this case, the trade is made first, before the event occurred.

I thing the GP is not talking about literal bribes that are ilegal. The idea is that every time someone fills a feature request the maintainer replies with a link to a bitcoin address a price, and until the money is in that address the maintainer does not implement the feature.

What I'm saying is that all projects NEED to have a shared financial incentive in order to have any chance at becoming self-sustaining and encouraging collaboration. It's orthogonal to the quality of the product. Monetary incentives provide the baseline for survival of the project in our modern, godless society. Look at any popular OSS project which exists today and you will see a connection to big money. This is no coincidence.

It's hypocritical to suggest that this is dirty or unethical when the entire economy including all popular open source projects depend on these same kinds of financial incentives to exist.

The modern monetary system is corrupt to the core and yet it drives every single human interaction and every single collaboration. Let's not pretend it doesn't.

Do you mean approaches like tea.xyz by Max Howell (https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638)? It looks interesting but I'm unclear if project maintainers would monetize or only the package manager cli.

Makes a lot of sense to sell a service powered by an open source project. Why is the blockchain token "the best way", or necessary at all?

As far as I understood tea.xyz it uses a DAO contract to "bill" every download/install by the user. If you don't pay (in tokens) you won't get the package.

So the blockchain approach has a mechanism already in place that will support the payment.

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