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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>)
*The material on this wiki page is placed in the public domain. Where copyright is taken to apply, the material is dual-licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and GPLv3+*
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This talk is based on research on a new model for interactions in
living systems, including human social systems, called identity
architecture. The paper is available at this link:
<https://www.drym.org/IALS.pdf> In particular, the sections on "Economic
Systems," "Property," and "A Universal System" describe the rationale,
underlying principles, and dynamical consequences of an
attribution-based economic system. Follow its development at
<https://github.com/drym-org/identity> and support an ABE project near you!
----
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.
# Discussion
## Questions and answers
The initial questions below were answered live, and as they may be found in the live Q&A transcript, they are not fully transcribed below. The question on "human nature" has a more clear answer below, added after the fact. Following the live section is an extended Q&A section for the benefit of future readers who may have more questions.
### Live Q&A
Q: This seems to assume that there will be $ contributions commensurate with the value of the project vs. everyone freeloading because there is no incentive to pay
A: This concept of economy will make all participants stakeholders, so there is an incentive to pay. There are a number of open questions, though, as this idea is new.
Q: Are you aware of projects like OpenQ (https://www.openq.dev/)? Would that fit the model in your opinion?
A: Not familiar with OpenQ
Q: I see incredible amounts of overlap with the SourceCred system https://sourcecred.io/ , where attribution of antecedents, graph of contributions, fair-in-hindsight backpropogation is built-in. Are you aware of SourceCred?
A: Not very familiar with it [answered in more detail live, but I've also added more on this after the live section of Q&A below]
Q: How is this different from money? Not in some abstract ownership vs attribution way. Open source funding is an incentive problem, which this does not change as far as I can see.
A: Money can be revisited in the future but maybe not immediately.
Q: How would you approach a viable experiment?
A: We have a Github Action that automatically creates the boilerplate of files and directories needed for the accounting. Further development through dialogue because of the many questions open.
Q: Given that the oversight is a social process, how do you constrain the cognitive and time burdens of deciding the values of attributed contributions?
A: We start with simple heuristics and first tackle the majority of issues.
Q: How are the attribution amounts calculated? (ORGA NOTE: restored from a prior version; welcome to remove if this was your question and you removed it intentionally)
A: Dialectical Inheritance Attribution (DIA), a social practice described in the talk. One heuristic strategy that will be used will be "Analyze, Appraise, Anonymize, Attribute."
Q: What are your assumptions about human nature vis. self interest vs. altruism?
A: In the live Q&A I meandered on this point, so let me answer more clearly here.
ABE does not assume anything about human nature. It is neither cynical nor idealistic. Rather, it achieves the goals I mentioned in the talk in a purely structural way, setting up the source of value in such a way (DIA) that emergent incentives align with the common good. The "common good" emerges as simply being the aggregate of desires in a particular context. Since selfish desires cancel out at a sufficiently large scale, the incentive resultant from DIA forms what is good for everyone rather than what is good for some, in other words, exactly what we mean by the common good.
Another way of saying this is that in an ABE system, you don't have to choose between being altruistic and being selfish. The more you give, the more empowered you are, and so, the more selfish you are, the more altruistic you'll be. As a result, it isn't useful anymore to see things in terms of selfishness and altruism.
In response to this, some may say, well then we won't get credit for being "truly" good. To them I would say, it's so much more important for our world to teach people to be better than for us to worry about who is "truly" good on their own. If our world lets selfish and parochial people become cruel and deluded and further the cause of hate and injustice, then we have failed them and each other. Even the worst among us has great capacity for good, and the wonder of ABE is that it could use them to do good, teach them to be good, a kind of "Aikido" that redirects their inclinations to align with (without being limited by) what everyone agrees is good. After all, if we teach moral lessons in the ivory towers of our churches, temples, mosques and synagogues, while also teaching by our actual practices and systems that selfishness and winning and being egotistical are good, then what results can we expect?
Q: URL of the project?
A:
- The founding documents for the prototype economic system are at https://github.com/drym-org/foundation
- The accounting system which you can use in your projects (contains setup instructions) is at https://github.com/drym-org/old-abe
- The research on which this is based is at drym.org
### Extended Q&A
The rest of these questions will be categorized under "ABE Now" -- relating to the prototype and practical considerations for adoption today, and "ABE Future" -- which discusses more philosophical issues regarding the nature and goals of the system.
#### ABE Now
Q: How is this different from splitting donations to my project with my partners?
A: In one respect it is dramatically different from that, and that is that *creators are not required to participate in this process*. Rather, it is a service provided to members of the community by members of the community. This shift may seem small on the surface, but it is precisely what lends this idea the power to solve the big problems I mentioned in the talk. There are two other differences, as ABE:
1. Recognizes antecedents in both directions. It's not just sharing proceeds from your project with your buddies, but also sharing with creators whose works and ideas are reflected in yours. And likewise, it's others sharing proceeds from their projects with you.
2. Encourages investment. It's easy enough to write a small project with your buddies, but when you have big dreams, you need big resources. If you are doing a startup in today's system, you divide "ownership" shares with your buddies and also with investors with deep pockets who can help you scale your project up to provide the maximum value. It's the same in ABE, except that anyone can be an investor simply by paying money to the project. This allows you to scale up your project by the support of ordinary mortals and not only "angels." It also means that every project will scale up to the right extent -- not too much and not too little -- because there are no incentives to wring value out of projects when there are more efficient ways to get the same amount of value -- there are no barriers to becoming an investor, after all. If your particular horse isn't winning, there is no cost, and indeed an incentive, to pick another horse rather than force your horse to win at any cost. Of course, in an ABE system, you don't own these horses, they aren't even competing, and there usually wouldn't even be a clear boundary between them!
Q: How is this different from SourceCred and OpenQ? When there are technologies and services like these around, why do we need ABE?
A: Systems like SourceCred are promising, and it's great that they're being developed. Technologies such as these will be indispensable to ABE's operations in the long term. At the same time, I want to strongly emphasize that technology is not the _basis_ of the new system. Instead, the basis of ABE is dialogue and agreement. This is a central idea because it means that anyone who has ever contributed value, and anyone who is contributing value today, and anyone who will contribute value in the future, can rest in the safety of collective attribution and be recognized and empowered -- people like you. Aside from sharing your work, there is nothing technological that you need to do (e.g. record your contribution on a blockchain, or be part of a software project that is using an attribution-oriented compensation scheme such as SourceCred, or have patents on your ideas, or anything else) in order to be eligible to be recognized for what you did, are doing, and will do.
Q: What prevents bad actors from taking over?
A: There are many possible kinds of bad actor.
- Those who use your project and don't pay.
For now, this is OK and expected. But as the system scales, becoming eligible to _receive_ attributive payments means consenting to participate in ABE wholesale. So the more valuable a project is, the greater is its incentive to participate.
- Those who will make improvements and sell independently instead of contributing back.
This person is operating under the assumption that they will be able to generate more money on their own than through others via well-established channels of attribution and use. This assumption is generally unlikely to hold.
- Those who attempt to set standards that benefit themselves.
Because standards are set in an anonymized way, such self-serving standards are only likely to prevail on small scales where participants cannot be truly anonymous. At larger scales, this "Dialectical Mirror" ensures that these incentives cancel out ensuring that fair standards win over selfish ones. Additionally, since DIA is applied globally -- that is, the standards agreed upon in special cases are generalized to the maximum extent possible -- self-serving incentives in special cases would be negated by standards decided in the general case. To put this all in simple terms, "desires that benefit only oneself don't scale, desires that benefit all do." I call this the "Good vs Evil" principle. It is a very interesting mathematical property of an ABE system.
- Those who do not report payments.
The ABE constitution requires that payments being reported is a collective responsibility -- both payers as well as payees can report it. Payers have an incentive to report it because it counts as an investment. Payees have an incentive to report it because being in non-conformance with the constitution can make the project ineligible to continue receiving attributive payments from the system.
But in general, yes it is important to put safeguards in place to protect against identified risks, and no doubt, there is a lot of work to do on this front. If you can think of such risks, you can help by bringing them up and/or helping to implement the necessary safeguards. We're all in this together!
Q: If in ABE some portion of payments to my project go to upstream projects, then isn't there less incentive for me to work on my project?
A: Some portion of your revenues go upstream, but by the same token, some portion of revenues of downstream projects come to you. Determining the precise proportions of value is not an easy problem, and it will take time and experimentation to arrive at the "sweet spot" for simultaneously incentivizing future work while fairly recognizing past work.
Q: I don't see a license on ABE projects. What gives?
A: Whether you have a license or not, and whether your project is proprietary or not, it is in all cases eligible to be recognized by ABE (but note that if your code is not open source, then there is less value there to be recognized -- constituting an _incentive_ to release your code).
By virtue of this, having a license on ABE projects would amount to introducing something distracting which has no bearing on the process. Additionally, as ABE endorses non-ownership, that essentially puts these projects in the public domain. Projects that are not owned don't need licenses. After all, who would be in a position to issue such a license if no one has special privileges to begin with?
Q: OK, but why not use the Unlicense or Creative Commons?
A: Licenses like the Unlicense, well intentioned though they are, don't really help because they offer a glimpse at an open and free world that they don't provide any means of attaining, leading to complacency on the part of the user. To be fair, we owe such licenses a debt of gratitude as they have helped us get to the point where people are more receptive to the idea of non-ownership. But such crutches hinder us now -- if a potential user sees the Unlicense and if this vision of a free world takes the place of the need for a real solution in their minds, then no one is better off for it. On the other hand, a declaration of non-ownership is, to paraphrase Leo Vivier, a thread of curiosity that you can follow to reveal more complete answers. Follow that thread, friends!
Q: DIA sounds like an involved process. How can it be done efficiently enough to usefully keep up with the pace of contributions to a project?
A: We use an idea that we call "Renormalization," which I'll explain soon. First, the system, at least at the initial stages, assumes that preferences in the system are consistent. If a person says they like A better than B and B better than C, we assume that they will like A better than C. By making this assumption, we can reduce the hard problem of appraising the value of a contribution to a project to the problem of simply appraising its value in relation to any other single aspect of the project that has already been appraised, and then "renormalizing" (i.e. ensuring the proportions total to 1, or a 100%) the attributed proportions to include the newly created value. For instance, it's hard to say how valuable a particular bug fix is to a project, but it's much easier to say how valuable it is in comparison to another bug fix that was already appraised. So, once there is a seed of appraised contributions, it becomes much easier to appraise new contributions. Periodically, the process of DIA would be conducted afresh to apply the standards more rigorously. This is analogous to a similar algorithm followed in the field of robotics, where a robot navigating a large room can have a rough idea of its position even if it is unable to see its surroundings, by maintaining an internal model of its own movements until visual data is available. Likewise, we can maintain useful appraisals of the value of pull requests even before we have had a chance to conduct the full process of DIA, which may be done at a much less frequent rate (e.g. monthly or quarterly) than the frequency of contributions.
#### ABE Future
Q: You said ABE solves appropriation. How does it do that?
A: Appropriation is unfairly benefiting from someone else's contributions. It is an inevitable consequence of the power law distribution where more empowered members of society are in a position to disproportionately benefit from the contributions of others due to the "loudspeaker" that empowerment equips one with, leading to a kind of "double counting" in empowerment causing the rich to get richer in a general (not just financial) sense.
The current solution to this problem is to impose constraints on the freedom of such empowered individuals and groups in order to prevent their profiting in this manner from the cultural creations of marginalized groups and individuals. Yet, while constraining the freedom of others is sometimes necessary, it is rarely desirable. Additionally, this solution isn't very effective, since it is only able to address visible acts of appropriation, and comes nowhere near addressing the full scale of the problem. In truth, by the time creations have been appropriated over timescales of years, decades, and centuries, the knowledge that they ever came from the marginalized group has long faded, and, indeed, such a claim would scarcely be believable since the creation would have a long association with the empowered group in the mainstream -- a mainstream which, after all, is disproportionately shaped by that group. In ABE, since attribution is the source of value and empowerment, and since this is done in an anonymized way that has strong fairness guarantees, greater empowerment does not enable one to unfairly benefit from creations. Indeed, it encourages mass dissemination of cultural creations since the originators will be empowered by virtue of such dissemination, allowing them to create _even more_ creations representative of their culture and traditions. In this way, it solves the problem of appropriation at every level of society, from contributions in a collaborative project to cultural creations at the scale of human society.
Q: You said ABE solves war. How does it do that?
A: War on the scale of nations is the same as fisticuffs on the scale of two blokes having a disagreement. It happens because of misaligned interests. The a priori "state of nature" of human interactions, and national interactions, is one where such misalignments may occur since these interests arise independently. Capitalism doesn't change the origin of such interests, and only pits them against one another on battlefield as a way for someone to get the prize. ABE invites us to reflect on those a priori interests and shows us that, if we all agree to "look in the dialectical mirror" before allowing these interests to interact in the world, we could modify these interests before the fact so that they align, by devising conventions, protocols, and standards that allow us to each get what we want. One such protocol is Dialectical Inheritance Attribution, which by virtue of a certain structural property (see "altruism"), allows us to place economic value on goods and services to the extent that they align with the common good. This removes the conditions for war in the great majority of cases. For the remainder, there may be other solutions to be found by looking in the dialectical mirror - it is full of illusion and wonder, and some say that all of our answers lie there for anyone who will peer far enough into its mists :)
Q: You said ABE solves poverty. How does it do that?
A: It may seem inconceivable that helping the poor could lead to financial rewards, but that's exactly what I'm saying an ABE system would do.
Response: That is a naive and idealistic position. According to your own statements, empowerment in an ABE system would be representive of true value contributed. Then, by definition, the poor are those who contribute the least value to society. If they don't contribute value, then how does helping them contribute value?
A: Even in the new system, although everything that is empowered would be good, not everything that is good would be empowered. People would be poor for many reasons. Sometimes it would be because they didn't contribute value, or because they caused problems for others. But other times, it would just be statistical accident, since the world isn't deterministic and things don't always go the way we expect. People may also be poor because we simply aren't able to discern the value in their contributions, though they may be valuable. After all, to use a timely example as it is Christmas time, many would say that Jesus contributed value to the world, and yet, he was poor, and it was a rudimentary system based on dialogue that saw him condemned to death. ABE cannot fully escape our capacity to make mistakes. But by recognizing helping the poor as a valuable activity, we allow such people to stand on their own feet and have a chance to create value in the future. No one would ever not be in a position to create value. Today, on the other hand, millions waste all of their time simply struggling to make ends meet, a neverending cycle that isn't conducive to creating value.
Response: But wouldn't it be more valuable to create real value directly, instead of helping those who may be unlikely to create such value?
A: Let me tell you about something I call the "Bhulbulaiyya Principle." The story goes that at one time in the past, the Indian town of Lucknow was struggling economically and there was widespread poverty. In response, its eccentric ruler decided to invent a project to engage the whole community -- the construction of a large maze (which is now called Bhul Bhulaiyya). The project, ostensibly a pointless one, created jobs for thousands and created downstream needs that created more jobs, so that the entire community came alive economically and all of their problems were solved.
Another name for this same principle could be the "Military Industrial Complex Principle," because, indeed, wars -- even the most pointless wars without a political goal -- are often good for a nation's economy.
So, when unambiguously "pointless" activities can be good for the economy in a capitalist system, it should not be so surprising that an activity like helping the poor, that is widely agreed upon as being good, would be good for the economy in an ABE system.
Q: In that case, what prevents freeloaders from just living off of the support of others?
A: Without even considering the structural inequities nor the dynamical tendencies (e.g. the cycles of addiction and crime) that are at play, an important factor in why people "freeload" today is that there are sharp discontinuities between being disenfranchised and being a self-sustaining and contributing member of society, resulting in a "chasm" that must be crossed by a force of will and fortune for the rehabilitation of those on the periphery of society. These discontinuities include (1) the finiteness of jobs, (2) the logistical and operational difficulties of managing the relationship of employment (on both sides), (3) the rigidity of the employment contract... among many other more subtle and deep-seated aspects. On the other hand, in an ABE system, if collective attribution of value created is the source of recognition in the form of money, employment is a superfluous concept as it is unnecessary to the process of value recognition and consequent payment. This significantly reduces the barriers to rehabilitation. Added to that, since the system also incentivizes working together, and is in principle able to recognize arbitrarily small contributions, the net result is the elimination of these discontinuities -- the "chasm" -- between being disenfranchised and being solvent.
Another thing is that the support of others doesn't only take the form of fulfilling the immediate needs of such would-be freeloaders. Rather, the greatest incentive is to help them in such a way that it puts them in a position to create value. Additionally, there is also an incentive to innovate on the ways of accomplishing this, so that we might expect there would be an entire industry around helping disenfranchised individuals in the most effective way as agreed upon collectively. All of these derive their value from recognition and attribution rather than supply and demand, so that even though, just like in a capitalist system, such methods and practices would be governed by financial incentives, in an ABE system these incentives would be aligned with the common good, so that it is structurally robust against abuse.
Q: Although you decry the Darwinian, winner-takes-all aspect of capitalism, it is a powerful incentive to innovate. If I don't have existential concerns in ABE, would I really be as intent on creating value? Are there sufficient incentives in ABE in comparison with capitalism?
A: Even setting aside for a moment that causing non-economical harm as a side effect of creating value is nowhere accounted in capitalism, in practice, only a small proportion of people in a capitalist society are truly creating the most value that they might. Most are coopted into established revenue streams because the system enables, and incentivizes, appropriating the talents of others less empowered than you, so that in a mathematical sense, even a small advantage for any individual actor leads to a biasing of local value to the maximization of value from the perspective of that actor, i.e. making the rich richer. That is, the system inherently has a second order effect of the rich getting richer, regardless of who they are, and this isn't based on something they do but is a dynamical property of the system -- it is _because_ they are rich that they get richer.
The net of it is that the incentives to innovate in capitalism are quickly smothered by locally self-serving incentives. To see evidence of this, look no further than the hundreds of promising startups that are acquired by larger companies and then simply shut down, essentially constituting a bribe to these founders to stop competing with the larger company, and instead to help the larger company with its existing programmes -- effectively defusing the very innovation that competition is supposed to spark.
So capitalism, after all, isn't as good at innovation as we like to think. But what about ABE?
In ABE, I would say that the incentive to innovate is stronger because you can rest assured that you will be fairly recognized the same way as anyone else, without having to jump through hoops to get startup capital or resources of any kind, or have special "connections" or a "network" or worry about who can be trusted and who might take advantage of you, since anyone can be an investor and a simple payment to a project makes you one. Thus there are incentives in place for others to invest in value you have to contribute, and therefore for others to discover what you have to say, if indeed what you have to say is valuable. It frees you up to do precisely what you love and precisely what you are good at and precisely what contributes the most value, without your having to worry about any of the logistics since there are incentives in place for those logistical details to be taken care of by all. _There will always be help_ at every stage, for any purpose, since it is all attributable.
## Feedback
- Thanks. Love your license.
- cue up a marxist analysis, and then shut down the proletariat? :D
- If I was being told that this man is one of Protesilaos' long lost siblings, I would believe it.
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