[[!sidebar content=""]] [[!meta title="Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model for Open Source"]] [[!meta copyright=""]] [[!meta license="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+."]] [[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/maint-nav)" raw="yes"]] # Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model for Open Source Sid Kasivajhula (any pronouns, commonly he/him, IRC: countvajhula, ) *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+* [[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/maint-before)" raw="yes"]] [[!template id="help" volunteer="" summary="Q&A could be indexed with chapter markers" tags="help_with_chapter_markers" message="""The Q&A session for this talk does not have chapter markers yet. Would you like to help? See [[help_with_chapter_markers]] for more details. You can use the vidid="maint-qanda" if adding the markers to this wiki page, or e-mail your chapter notes to ."""]] 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: 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 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 supply and demand 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, that code is worthless. 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 collective recognition. 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 - Q: This seems to assume that there will be $ contributions commensurate with the value of the project vs. everyone freeloading becuase 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 ()? Would that fit the model in your opinion? - A: not familiar with OpenQ - Q: I see incredible amounts of overlap with the SourceCred system , 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 - 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 dialog 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: - Q: What are your assumptions about human nature vis. self interest vs. altruism? - A: - Q: URL of the project? - A: - ## 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. [[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/maint-after)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/maint-nav)" raw="yes"]] [[!taglink CategoryCommunity]]