Loomio
Sat 18 Apr 2015 12:15PM

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

ST Simon Tegg Public Seen by 160

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 (?)
"

AX

Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis Wed 27 May 2015 12:58PM

@bobhaugen Sorry, I can't remember which ones. (not BetterMeans for sure)

AW

Aaron Wolf Wed 27 May 2015 2:11PM

FWIW, Stallman has told me he likes what we're doing with Snowdrift.coop and hopes it succeeds (his complaint is merely about our inclusion of the word "open" in talking of "free/libre/open"). Note that we are truly a new model. Our approach has not been tried. We do not attempt any sort of systematic auto-distribution through the network. We merely aim to have projects publicly note their upstream things and permit downstream projects to use donations to fund their upstream projects.

I happen not to be a bitcoin apologist. I am skeptical that any sort of bitcoin network protocol thing will make any difference when the problems are mostly in the social realm regarding getting the public to fund the more honorable ethical works, not in the distribution realm or technological (although we need holistic systems to answer these holistic problems).

BH

Bob Haugen Wed 27 May 2015 2:14PM

@wolftune - agree with you about bitcoin.

AX

Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis Wed 27 May 2015 2:46PM

@wolftune @simontegg The aproach of distributing revenue to contributors of the free/open source software is not as important as allowing peer production to exist at the edges where the sales happen.

Redhat for example has a very good incentive to contribute to the linux kernel but it would never give access to its revenue sources, its clients.

Unfortunately, what is happening at the moment is that we have a big enterprise per free/open software that takes most of the revenue. ex. LucidWorks for Lucene/Solr. Datastax for cassandra db.

Capital size allows those companies to provide services that single programmers wouldn't be able to do.

ST

Simon Tegg Thu 28 May 2015 3:26AM

Note as @bobhaugen and @joshuavial point out in the issue comments on the linked repo the bitcoin aspect of this is just some convenient experimental tooling, not the protocol itself.