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# Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model for Open Source
Sid Kasivajhula (any pronouns, commonly he/him, IRC: countvajhula, <mailto:sid@drym.org>)
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The problem of supporting open source software and contributors is a
pressing one, and one for which we don't have good solutions.
So many developers today pour their creative energies into
freely-distributed works only to have those same works of passion turn
into a pain in the neck when they find themselves eternally on the
hook to provide support in exchange for minimal or no compensation,
and often with limited assistance.
Fundamentally, the reason it's this way is that traditional economic
systems operate on <span class="underline">supply and demand</span> as the basis of value. In such
systems, open and unlimited availability translates into zero market
value, and consequently, open source enterprises are not economically
sound. Even in high profile projects, developers make a living purely
through value added services rather than from the core of the value of
their contributions – that is, from the code they wrote. Since, from
a market value standpoint, <span class="underline">that code is worthless</span>.
Copyright and patents (not to mention proprietary software) are an
attempt to address this within the existing economic model by imposing
artificial scarcity in order to induce market value. In principle,
they also provide safeguards against appropriation. On the other hand,
the unlimited availability of creative works is a profoundly good
thing from the perspective of maximizing value, and thus suppressing
it is deeply misguided. Organizations like the Free Software
Foundation have campaigned against such restrictions for some time
now, for related reasons; nevertheless, the problem of providing a
viable economic basis, aside from these crude attempts, remains
unaddressed.
Attribution-based economics is a new model that aims to remedy this
state of affairs by changing the basis of value from supply and demand
to <span class="underline">collective recognition</span>. This is facilitated by a process of
"inheritance attribution" where we collectively agree on the extent of
inherence of ideas and works in other (e.g. derivative) ideas and
works, by means of transparent and evolving standards. This model is
capable of recognizing a much larger set of valuable contributions,
including forms of value that cannot be coerced into a
supply-and-demand equation. That is, in this model, there is no need
to artificially restrict availability in order for something to be
considered valuable. By virtue of the curious property that
innovations on the process are themselves subject to the process of
recognition in a self-reflective way, we gain accuracy, and by the
property that agreed-upon standards apply equally to all, we gain
fairness – guarantees that are at best tenuously present in today's
economic systems.
This talk introduces some early experiments with attribution-based
economics in the Emacs community, and some initial proposals that
point the way forward on how, with your help, such a system might
scale up to larger projects and communities far beyond open source.
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