Unmagical solutions to open source's finanical issues
02 Jun 2020Gitcoin have a hackathon challenge to “Propose a radical markets idea to be used on gitcoin” that will increase the financial flow and contributions in open source projects. Not restricting myself to the radical markets constraint, I spent some hours thinking about the challenge and failed to see how the current system of open source has much chance of moving towards the type of market Gitcoin imagine.
I think there are ways to optimise open source without income based on good governance, but the step to actually earning money appears impossible without fundamental changes.
Starting with governance, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons showed the cases and defined conditions where a common resource can be well managed. This is a good sign for open source which, as this article describes, can be seen as a common resource:
Software is not a classical common pool resource, because it’s not subtractable - there’s no cost to the users or developers of a project if I choose to use it… The participants in this type of commons is the pool of potential contributors, rather than the pool of potential appropriators… This type of non-subtractive (additive?) commons has its own version of the freeloader problem - it pays for a contributor to hang back and wait for someone else to add a needed feature, rather than go to the expense of adding it themselves.
Governance/management of open source has been thought about for a long time. /The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the original manual for how a great open source working process can be created. It’s like a case study of Ostrom’s ideas.
These ideas allow open source to exist. In practice I think the long lasting projects do them all already. Yet open source is still basically a charity. When they need money, they have trouble.
Feross has a clear post on some of the grievances open source developers hold and focuses more on these financial difficulties. The main examle of his post is that he put ads in some of his open source packages and people complained about it. I think those people are outrageous.
He is right to try to find how he can better profit from his work. But open source developers have created a difficult problem for themselves by working for free and releasing software with an open license. From this point being able to make a good income is not obvious). Ostrom’s ideas help define how to sustain an open source project, but not much about how to make it profitable.
Patreonage like Github sponsors and Gitcoin grants reduce the friction to donating, but they don’t change the system. They won’t enable open source developers to earn close to the value they provide. Nor do I think that adults gifting crypto art to each other will help much.
Not all problems have solutions without changing the system. And I think improving the financials of the average open source project is a problem with no solution. If the average open source developers work for free and give their product away, they will earn much much less than the average salaried developer.
I see two unmagical solutions for the overworked open source developers who don’t want people making millions off their work.
One is to stop.
An ocean cannot walk away when we drag nets along its belly, but a developer can. The developer can also talk and coordinate. This is a well known weakness of fishes and other non-human creatures. Ostrom shows these creatures are sometimes able to exist sustainably but not while humans are unaware that the resource they are using up is scarce or delicate and not while the humans are unable to work together.
By stopping in large numbers, open source developers can start to force companies to realise that they are a scarce resource. This can perhaps lead to coordinated action amongst the companies that rely on those open source resources, which the open source developers can help shape.
Another unmagical hackathon solution is that companies profiting directly from products built on open source projects can do much of the work to maintain them as its their incentive. This happens for some projects already.
If Gitcoin is to further its mission, perhaps the best thing it can do is to make it easier to create “Open Core Companies”. Much like Stripe who make money when peolpe sell things online created Stripe Atlas to help people create online businesses.
If there were huge numbers of open core companies and/or open source developers used coordinated action to force the coordinated action of companies, platforms like Gitcoin could become places for open source developers to contribute to multiple projects and earn a good living. Obviously, that would be fantastic.