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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Creating a DAO for this sounds _incredibly_ risky to me. One tiny flaw in the design of that organization and the project could be destroyed by people gaming the DAO rules for profit.

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There is absolutely nothing that stops anyone from forking the project.

There's nothing literally stopping someone click "fork" on GitHub. There are tons of things that make it difficult for people to create a successful forked version that people use and contribute to.

Though in this case I guess they could just use Gogs anyway.

Hi Simon! First, let me thank you for all that you do with Open Source. I package a few of your Python libraries for NixOS, and they are all so wonderful. I'm the author of the blog post above, and agree with your concerns. That's why we are not committing to creating a DAO, but wanted to to let everyone know it was something that was being looked into to empower the community, and make sure the voice of the community is still very much present. I mention community 4 times in the blog post it is that important to me.

But does decentralized autonomous organization always have to imply blockchain?

I'm hoping they mean something else but I really can't imagine what. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...

If they didn't mean blockchain they could have not used a phrase that is very strongly associated with it, and instead used any number of other terms in colloquial use that match the properties of the organization they're setting up.

If you look at the sponsors at the bottom of the page linked, the first name is a blockchain company/organisation, which in my mind lends credibility to the fears that they really do mean blockchain and aren't just jumping on the buzz-phrase bandwagon.

We have the words "corporation" or "company" (or "foundation" or "conservancy") for easy to find synonyms of "organization" and despite appearances none of those words directly implies either "centralized" or "decentralized". There are companies and foundations that are built quite decentralized meeting only remotely over the internet today.

Companies and corporations are far from "autonomous" however, and that word currently always implies "smart contracts" and blockchain.

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