The Flossbank Attempt | Hacker News Reader

The Flossbank Attempt

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35 pointsprotontypes17 comments

Sadly I think broad funding for non-commercial OSS might be an unsolvable problem, or at least a problem that can't be solved by a startup.

I'd like to see the government try and step in (a common solution to Tragedy of the Commons problems) with a grant program.

Wrote an article about this recently for Open Core Ventures:

https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2022-03-someone-has-to-pay...

Obviously OCV is partial to open core, but the idea of open source that can win in the traditional business sense is being pushed forward by innovative companies (ex. Supabase) and YC itself at this point via the investments they make. It’s not all doom and gloom out there.

That said, library authors are certainly one of last and hardest people to properly compensate. Projects like NestJS seem to do well.

Guess we can put a pin in the idea of CLI ad space for now (and hopefully forever)

I don't have an actual answer, but I strongly suspect that the compensation of library authors is going to somehow be tied to supply chain assurance. At some point it will be considered irresponsible (perhaps to the point of liability) to ship software containing FLOSS libraries without paying somebody to do a minimal audit that the version shipped has not been hijacked by malware. The only question in my mind is whether any of that money will flow to actual creators, or whether it will just sustain a self-licking ice cream cone.

Sad yet expected. When one gets used to paying nothing it's hard to see the long term impact of never giving back.

wow I'm really happy in-terminal advertisements didn't take off. Advertisers sure want to infect every aspect of our lives.

Remember on the other side of every advertisement is a business desperately trying to reach customers.

We could certainly do without the tracking, dark patterns and other unscrupulous behavior but at the core, advertising is businesses trying to reach new customers.

I mean I still block ads and recommend ublock origin to people I know but I also see the other side of it.

> a business desperately trying to reach customers

Also read: "a business that thinks its entitled to dozens to thousands of people's attention"

I think my biggest gripe is how dramatically we undervalue people's attention. Not just the businesses but as a culture as well. Studies are finally coming out shining a light on the incredible long-term harm the attention economy has on people's mental health

> Also read: "a business that thinks its entitled to dozens to thousands of people's attention"

true, the vast majority of businesses probably don't deserve the attention they're trying to get via ads.

> I think my biggest gripe is how dramatically we undervalue people's attention. Not just the businesses but as a culture as well. Studies are finally coming out shining a light on the incredible long-term harm the attention economy has on people's mental health

Well we've got a market now, and one of the things they're pretty good at doing is establishing pricing, so we can measure it a bit more now.

The attention economy is pretty broad -- I do wonder how much of that is mixed up with the various platforms' attempts to get you addicted so they can also serve you ads. The old internet with banner ads on pages/blogs you went to didn't seem quite so bad for mental health in particular.

For example I don't think people suffer mental health issues from recipe sites with lots of ads and autoplay videos, despite how annoying and wasteful it is.

Remember that advertisers have the majority of the power in this relationship because they're the ones with the money. If advertisers demanded that ad networks only showed ads in an ethical manor they'd comply. Advertisers don't however, because they don't care.

You don't get to play the game of "oh this thing we're trying to do is ok" but ignore the fact all your methods to do it are are unethical and you know that and you still continue to use them.

For those interested in working on FLOSS projects, FOSSjobs has a list of many of the different ways one can get paid for this, including the many employers that primarily work on FLOSS projects:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

I thought this was about a FLOSS bank. There was actually open source bank software https://www.cyclos.org/.

Ugh this is a bummer to read. It's going to take a mindset change for the industry.

Gitcoin has solved this problem! https://gitcoin.co/

A selection from their subreddit linked off their homepage should be enough to warn you about how they can get funding for open source projects where the regular market can't.

- One day you will look back at these prices and think "I cant believe it was so cheap"

- These prices are a dream. Already bought a big bag on discount. See you guys in 2 years.

- When will Gitcoin reach 500$

Much like crypto praying on people in desperate financial situations, I really hope hard working open source developers are not left holding the bag if this coin goes under.

... Has it though? The problem here isn't that the tech doesn't exist to support open source. It's that companies don't care to. There's no budget because there's no clear business benefit. Using advertising adds some level of business benefit for the funder, but probably represents an untenable decline in user experience for the fundee.

Gitcoin seems to actually make the problem worse through quadratic matching, so if I have a specific thing I want to fund well because my business relies on it, Gitcoin is the worst possible way for me to do that because my cash will flow through to a bunch of stuff lots of other people care about (but idgaf).

I know HN hates web3, but I invite you to look at little bit deeper: http://gitcoin.co/results

Ok so, again, my point here is that Open Source funding isn't a technical problem that can be solved by a technical solution (and that I think quadratic matching is stupid for funding solutions to high-impact problems).

But, I did look at that, and I'm not sure that I trust the numbers. I clicked around a little. The top earner for the week is https://gitcoin.co/0xngmi. 0xngmi is working a crypto project (fine), but seems to have only received one bounty and one 10 DAI tip ever. So how are they the top earner for the week?

The top earner for the quarter is an NFP Crypto lobby group. They've earned $855k... somehow? Over 13 tips and 13 bounties? What do you mean 13 bounties? Does this Lobby group also fix Django bugs on the weekend?

I'm not saying I don't think it's a good idea; although I'm wary of anything Crypto, this might be the closest I've seen to a reasonable use for it. I just don't know that I trust the numbers.

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