>Any company that used faker.js to make a profit would have X% of that revenue feed back to the smart contracts.
Doesn't work in the real world. If you rely on them to tell you what their profit are for a project, they'll just give you a value of 0$ and continue to not pay you the same way they did before. The blockchain/smart-contracts adds no value compared to changing the licence on your code because either way you have to beg/sue them to get paid.
Even with a client who is well intentioned and wants to pay you, they will never want to link their profit to a smart contract and expose their financial data. Measuring profit btw is very complicated and there is a lot of human interpretation to it, you can have a company worth bilions of dollars with top employees making millions per years even if it technically has never made a profit.
And also, the risk of a bug in the smart contract emptying their account would be enough to stop any serious companies.
If we were in a different version of the world (which we might end up in), it will be a no-brainer for someone to create a company that openly builds on the work of others and shares profit with those others. It democratizes the "I only need a small piece of a big pie" business model.
Not every commit is worth the same level of compensation.
Companies like Google/Amazon have to go through and adjust compensation based on talent and contribution levels, but how would that be done in Open Source?
In [my] ideal scenario it's not the people that are vetted and compensated, but the work itself. A student who comes up with a particularly genius contribution could be compensated as equally as someone who worked in the field for decades and proposed the same contribution.
Note: it also requires an environment where work is recorded publicly so that plagiarism is essentially impossible, though that brings it's own challenges.
> I totally agree that it does not work in the current version of the real world.
Quick notes:
- I'm talking about a hypothetical ideal future as I see it, and why that's exciting to me
- I don't think we're anywhere close to where we need to be for this to be realistic. More like 50+ years when we figure out patents, copyright, delivery, and fine-detail privacy-friendly monetization (person X purchased Y because of seeing a billboard and having conversations with sales rep Z.)
- I like moonshots. I think that setting big ideals as goals is a great way to get to where we can be as a society and as a planet. No one else is obligated to share that mindset or those goals (or even agree that those ideals will get those goals)
If a founder came along and saw that a specific open source project could be the foundation for a business, then they could use it to build that business and feed back a portion of all profit as an operating expense. Then everyone involved would be benefited by contributing.
The biggest thing that excites me about the possibilities for the future of smart contracts is that creators of all kinds could automatically benefit from any work they do.
This scenario, for example: Any company that used faker.js to make a profit would have X% of that revenue feed back to the smart contracts. The creator would probably get the most, followed by the maintainer, then anyone who had a PR approved, then maybe people who submitted good bug reports. All automatically, and all directly in to everyone’s wallet.
Not only would this be an easy way for creators to get paid, it would also incentivize the maintenance of those creations.
And if you didn’t want to get paid, you could simply have funds directed to charity or opt out of your share entirely.