Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
We’re a philanthropic fund that makes grants and investments to improve humanity’s long-term prospects.
Future Fund June 2022 Update
The core problem is not that open source projects are not sharing the money received. The problem is that, in total numbers, open source is not getting enough money. $2.5 million is not enough. To put this number into perspective, startups get typically much more than that.
André Staltz • Software below the poverty line
Web3 teams have an opportunity to learn from and improve on the strategy of commoditizing the complement. In this essay, we’ll discuss why building and commoditizing a product on top of a user-owned protocol offers maximum leverage to execute this strategy, with potential for stronger economic equilibriums that drive growth, and value, beyond that... See more
Jesse Walden • Product vs. Protocol: Finding a Balance in Web3 – Variant
This looks less like a process of secularization and more like a paradigmatic shift from an institutional to a personal understanding of spirituality. In a qualitative study of a 100 teenagers in five major cities, Richard Flory and Donald Miller found that millennials are not “the spiritual consumers of their parents’ generation, rather they... See more
Casper ter Kuile • How we gather
We build Plain as a product-centric company, where everyone is close to our customers. 👇 | Simon Rohrbach posted on the topic | LinkedIn
Simon Rohrbachlinkedin.com
Open Source Software and Collective ownership, Coops, and User Owned Platforms
I would argue that this is roughly the state of "open source" today. It is the modern software developer’s marmelade, with the OSI as our Konfitürenverordnung, continuing to aggressively enforce a phrase that has since evolved in the popular vernacular.
"open source" is not the logical negation of "closed source"
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Now that Open Source is heavily depended on by nearly every commercial company, we’re running into sustainability and maintainability problems. These are problems that really didn’t exist at scale before. A very famous recent example of this is the XZ Utils backdoor exploit, where an open source maintainer accepted a subtle but significant compromise from a bad actor, partially due to burnout and harassment of the maintainer.
However, I see this in nearly every maintainer that I talk to. It’s almost impossible to make money by writing and maintaining Open Source software, due to several factors. Everyone wants and expects free shit, and nobody feels that they need to support the people making this all possible.
The strange new truth is that most open source developers and maintainers are now patronized by large corporations.
What would be more ideal is to have not one company paying each developer, which is subject to the whims of corporate KPIs and management changes, but instead to have thousands of companies pay a very small amount to professional maintainers.
The main problem is that there is no good way to do this currently. There is little to no incentive for companies to do this and there are few ways to aggregate and disperse such funding.
The second growing problem in the Open Source ecosystem is the problem of the new generation of Commercial Open Source.
Developers have now been growing up for decades loving Open Source and open communities, and when they start companies and projects, by default they want them to be open. However, there are corporate sustainability issues with Open Source, just as there are with individual maintainer. Somewhat ironically, The Man is now using Open Source licenses to stick it to the developer!