For the past months you probably have heard a lot about metaverse, crypto, DeFi, web3.0, NFTs and other topics on hype. As a big fan of open-source, the first thing that came to my mind when I was digging into crypto is its usefulness for developers.
I believe that the most interesting and promising things in this wolrd can be created as a result of synergy between spheres which in the beginning seemed to be completely unrelated – like crypto and open-source.
Crypto ₿ + open-source 💻 = future of software 🚀?
The open-source movement played a major role in blockchain adoption, ensuring transparency and auditability for all participants of the ecosystem. Source code for Ethereum and for many other blockchains is open-source and avaliable on GitHub, so everyone could spin up an Ethereum node and ensure there is no hidden logic there. Now the DeFi movement, that is powered by blockchain, can pay back to the open-source community by creating a platform for its sustainability. Let's try to figure out together, how the synergy between crypto and open-source could look like.
More and more developers of purely open-source projects feel bad about large companies using their software for free. For instance, take a look at how the developer of "Colors" and "Faker" JavaScript libraries corrupted them and impacted thousands of projects around the world. The developer was frustrated with the low level of support companies provide to the open-source community:
Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work.
There isn't much else to say.
Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.
Well, I do understand this frustration – developers of open-source projects spend their lives building software which is used by the whole world and get nothing from it. Moreover, every software requires periodical updates, patches and bug fixes. You can't just release something and forget about it.
Of course, there are companies who understand this problem and donate money to different foundations. Still, they can only cover a small fraction of open-source projects avalaible out there. But what about your favorite color picker library? What about templating engine which is used by thousands of websites in production?
Crypto has a massive opportunity to change the way the global financial system works. The human productivity and occupation heavily depends on financial incentives. Commuting to your work, staying late in the office and even joining dozens of Zoom calls every day - all this, eventually, is related to financial incentives. But…
But what if you would get paid just for jogging? What if you would have a power to spend all your time working on open-source software not worrying about financial well-being? Let's take a look at projects what bring this idea closer to reality.
GitCoin is probably the pioneer in open-source public goods funding. It is like a marketplace, where developers can work on open-source projects and get paid for them. For instance, one can participate in bounty hunting, apply for a hackathon or request grant funding for an open-source project. On another side of the marketplace, there are people who can reward developers with crypto.
GitCoin is built around a concept called quadratic funding. The idea is that GitCoin has its own matching pull, which basically "matches" donations made by the community to open-source projects. But matching multiples are not proportional to sizes of donations - they also depend on number of donors. For instance, imagine if two projects raise the same amount of funding from the community, but the first project has 1o backers and second has only 3. Then, according to qudratic funding principle, the first project would receive more money from the matching pool, as it provides more value for the community.
If you curious to know more about quadratic funding, you can check out a detailed article by Vitalik. Alternatively, there is also a quite short and fun resource on that matter.
Tea is another really interesting startup which is focused on supporting open-source developers. It is founded by Max Howell, the guy who created super popular tool for MacOS called Homebrew. Recently Tea announced its $8M seed round led by Binance and also released a white-paper.
The idea of Tea is to automatically track all contributions and actions made by developers. Based on the activity, Tea will reward developers with its own token.
But how one can track all contrubutions? Tea does it in a really developer-oriented manner by introducing a CLI tool which acts as a middleware during development. Tea actually goes further than this - it proposes creation of decentralized software registry, which would keep track of how all software packages are interconnected (crypto GitHub!). Using this information (stored on blockchain), Tea would be able to fairly incentivize developers for their contributions.
Of course, there are lots of technical and tokenomical challenges for Tea which are yet to be tackled. But the opportunity is nothing short of astonishing. brew2 for web3 is coming.
Aviyel is a platform which helps open-source projects to grow and engage their communities in a web3 way. Specifically, open-source projects can launch NFTs (including soulbound ones) and tokens to reward their contributors.
On another side of the platform, there are developers who want to contrubute to open-source. Aviyel helps them to discover interesting projects, checkout rewards and finally contribute.
Last but not least, Aviyel also provides web2 utitlities for open-source startups like discussions, learning center and community events management.
Aviyel has a lot of overlaps with GitCoin, but that really makes it to stand out is ability to lauch your token and NFTs.
SourceCred is an open-source platform that helps open-source communities to fairly value its participants and reward them accordingly. SourceCred uses special algorithm to calculate "Cred" score for each contributor based on commits, comments, issues and other activities.
Apart from that, SourceCred allows projects to launch their own crypto tokens, which will be used to incentivize contributors. This token is called "Grain". The idea is that contrubutors can convert their "Creds" into "Grain". Then, "Grain" can be swapped into other tokens like ETH or USDC.
Being open-source, SourceCred provides a lot of flexibility. For instance, one can configure specific token distrubution rules, "Cred" calculation details and many other things. SourceCred is based on a popular ranking algorithm called PageRank.
Finally, SourceCred is really easy to set up. All your need to keep the system running is GitHub pages environment and two GitHub actions. So yep, it's totally free.
GitNFT is a bit different from other tools mentioned here. It is a web app which allows anyone to mint their GitHub commits as NFTs.
GitNFT integrates with GitHub to make sure you are the real author of this commit. Then, it generates a nice-looking picture of your commit and mints it as NFT on Polygon blockchain. Finally, NFT is automatically listed on OpenSea and anyone can purchase it!
Of course, GitNFT is not about sustainable funding for open-source contributors. It is rather a fun and creative way to promote your contribution and make some extra money out of it (sometimes it could me much though). Nice bonus that you not only receive money from the first sale, but also a percentage from all other resales.
I believe that the open-source is the best way to produce software. It might be challenging in the beginning, but provides incredible benefits in the long run.
Still, despite the fact open-source movement exists for a long time, there are plenty of challenges to be solved, and namely financial incentives for contributos. Couple of years ago it was impossilble even to imagine that one can make a living working on open-source projects without any commercial purpose. And now we finally have all the tooling to make it happen.
I bet in the near future these innovations would allow thousands of talented developers to ditch their enterpise jobs and got into open-source. Still bullish on SaaS? It's time for open-source!