The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

1

Open Collective

There have been steps forward in the direction of making donation easier: https://github.com/sponsors , which can serve as a "fiscal host." The advantage here is that the default rule at law for how a group of developers working together will be treated is partnership, which means joint and several liability. Working with a fiscal host partitions individual liability from group liability. But there are still open questions. I don't know all the details of how Open Collective works from a corporate law perspective. How do they partition the liability of different collectives that are hosted by the same fiscal host? That is important to understand because otherwise, the collectives that share a fiscal host are partners. This is better than all of the individuals who contribute to each and all of the collectives being partners (because there's still a partition between individual and group liability), but worse than if each collective's liability was partitioned from the other collectives' liability (and the fiscal host itself's liability). This seems like an active area for legal innovation. No jurisdiction I know of is optimizing to maximize speed and minimize cost of setting up corporations. Yet without the ability to shield the contributors of capital and labor from individual liability, there isn't much a group of individuals can do in our modern economy. The problems that many DAOs have had is a case study in this. People who care about open source should also care about scaling up the speed and minimizing the cost of incorporating. Stripe Atlas and similar services are underrated sources of economic growth for this reason, IMHO.

#Crowdfunding #Fundraising And Donation Management #Online Payments 72 social mentions

2

GitHub Sponsors

There have been steps forward in the direction of making donation easier: https://github.com/sponsors , which can serve as a "fiscal host." The advantage here is that the default rule at law for how a group of developers working together will be treated is partnership, which means joint and several liability. Working with a fiscal host partitions individual liability from group liability. But there are still open questions. I don't know all the details of how Open Collective works from a corporate law perspective. How do they partition the liability of different collectives that are hosted by the same fiscal host? That is important to understand because otherwise, the collectives that share a fiscal host are partners. This is better than all of the individuals who contribute to each and all of the collectives being partners (because there's still a partition between individual and group liability), but worse than if each collective's liability was partitioned from the other collectives' liability (and the fiscal host itself's liability). This seems like an active area for legal innovation. No jurisdiction I know of is optimizing to maximize speed and minimize cost of setting up corporations. Yet without the ability to shield the contributors of capital and labor from individual liability, there isn't much a group of individuals can do in our modern economy. The problems that many DAOs have had is a case study in this. People who care about open source should also care about scaling up the speed and minimizing the cost of incorporating. Stripe Atlas and similar services are underrated sources of economic growth for this reason, IMHO.

#Fundraising And Donation Management #Crowdfunding #Content Monetization 42 social mentions