Update: "Sustain" a protocol and tooling for giving to the commons

Some of us discussed what you might call an "Open Value Protocol" at the recent Open Source/Open Society conference here in Wellington. The general idea is to facilitate funds flowing back from user facing monetised software to the lower level open source software on which they depend.

We got some positive responses about the concept from other developers.

Josh has started a (very early days) repository -"sustain" for declaring a project's economic dependencies and bitcoin related tooling.

Back in October I emailed Stacco Troncoso and others in an email thread about Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses with our plans for this and I'll post the edited version of the relevant bit here for wider interest

"
...with the goal of scaling Enspiral-like economic arrangements beyond Enspiral, it occurred to me that a vocab or protocol for describing contributions/revenue sharing/profit sharing could work well alongside a CBRL

the assumptions are that:
* public, transparent contributions will encourage others to do the same..
* software projects are accustomed to listing their software dependencies, listing these as economic 'dependencies' isn't a huge leap (especially if the format is similar). It might sit on github next to package.json (which lists depencies for node.js projects)
* Enspiral companies/teams could show leadership by listing (even token) amounts/percentages to FLOSS ...projects to get them interested in alternative ways of supporting FLOSS.
* A protocol makes these arrangements machine-readable. - questions like "if A gives to B who gives to C etc, where does the money end up" are easier to answer.
* A network of FLOSS projects, with voluntary economic contributions amongst each other would form an Open Value Network. The 'value equation' emerges from these relationships.
* Companies could use the same protocol to describe their profit distribution arrangements transparently.

Next steps for OpenApp:
0. See if the OpenApp community are on board.
1. Produce working software.
2. Make a sale.
3. List our economic dependencies and contributions and contact them:"how do we give you money?"
4. Publish participating Enspiral companies existing contribution arrangements in the protocol to try it out (?)
"