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Comment by matteotom | Hacker News Reader

Funding for open source projects has been a problem for about as long as open source projects have existed. I'm not sure I follow why you think specifying donations will go towards LLM tokens will suddenly open the floodgates.

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If you don't get it, then you should read the blog post and come back if you have questions.

Wow, impressively insufferable

I did. Your argument seems to be that LLMs allow users who want specific features to direct a donation specifically towards the (token) costs of developing that feature. But I don't see how that's any different from just offering to pay someone to implement the feature you want. In fact, this does happen, eg in the case of companies hiring Linux devs; but it hasn't worked as a general purpose OSS-funding mechanism.

Because offering to pay people to implement features is very expensive and tends to take a long time, if they do it at all. Often, they can't even find people to pay to implement things.

In the case of companies hiring Linux devs, that is is very, very costly and thereby inaccessible. Scale makes it different from the scenario of paying a few dollars to contribute tokens to fix a bug.

It seems the assumption you're making without justifying is LLMs will significantly reduce the cost of software development. Even if LLMs can reliably write new features (or even just fix bugs), the maintainer still needs to spend time (which is not free) verifying and code-reviewing the LLM-produced code.

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