folks,
I have an outrageous idea. I'm wondering what you think of it.
The real value of squeak is the community. Since we are considering the possibilities of opening a hole can of worms, here, why don't we turn it up a notch. Let's form a corporation and issue preferred stock to a bunch of people. I am thinking the entire squeak and E communities should own stock. We'll want to distribute it commensurate to 'contribution' somehow, but there is really no fair way, is there? So we'll have a vote. And whatever the results, we'll abide by them. I don't know how the vote will work, but maybe each person has 100 shares to distribute and they distribute them to specific people or organizations. Whatever they want to do with it, they can. Perhaps it would be easier to just decide amongst ourselves, I don't know.
Then we build a system that can reliable trade that stock, with security.
then we look for ways to inject real money into the system.
the only way for the stock to ever be worth money is if we build the system to support it
the code we write, will be open-source, under our open source license. We could give Apple some of the stock to buy their license from them. :)
the value will be in the system we build with the code, not the code itself.
so? is it crazy enough to work? It's like an experiment. Do you want to try it, just for the hell of it? It might be possible to get funding to create such a system and track it's growth and evolution.
regards, rob
On Friday 31 January 2003 23:03, Robert Withers wrote:
folks,
I have an outrageous idea. I'm wondering what you think of it.
The real value of squeak is the community. Since we are considering the possibilities of opening a hole can of worms, here, why don't we turn it up a notch. Let's form a corporation and issue preferred stock to a bunch of people. I am thinking the entire squeak and E communities should own stock. We'll want to distribute it commensurate to 'contribution' somehow, but there is really no fair way, is there? So we'll have a vote. And whatever the results, we'll abide by them.
I think monetizing the effort requires a closer alignment with the 'gift economy'.
I think the "Open Source Coordinator" for the project should mint a new brand of erights. The coordinator can then set bounties on the outstanding bugs and feature requests, payable in the new brand of erights.
For example, you want some squeaker to translate my doc-code implementation to Squeak. Decide how much that is worth to you, relative to the rest of the e-squeak effort. Post a bounty for the implementation, payable in e-squeak rights. Do the same for all the tasks in your bug/feature tracker.
New projects can bootstrap themselves by initially offering bounties payable in erights from a more popular project. Once the new project reaches a critical mass of community support, it can try to float its own brand of erights. The endless desire to start new projects should create sufficient demand to support a liquid market in old erights.
If people would be interested in using such a system, I would be interested in building it.
Tyler
Hey Tyler,
On Saturday, February 1, 2003, at 06:37 AM, Tyler Close wrote:
On Friday 31 January 2003 23:03, Robert Withers wrote:
folks,
I have an outrageous idea. I'm wondering what you think of it.
The real value of squeak is the community. Since we are considering the possibilities of opening a hole can of worms, here, why don't we turn it up a notch. Let's form a corporation and issue preferred stock to a bunch of people. I am thinking the entire squeak and E communities should own stock. We'll want to distribute it commensurate to 'contribution' somehow, but there is really no fair way, is there? So we'll have a vote. And whatever the results, we'll abide by them.
I think monetizing the effort requires a closer alignment with the 'gift economy'.
Do you have some references to 'gift economy'? That is clearly an element of what I had in mind, but I wanted to go a step further and tie it to a real legal entity and give it measurable value. I was thinking it should be like currencies that are based on either an underlying value standard (gold) or the credibility of the issuer and it's relation to other currencies. My thinking was that initially we would want just one 'brand' until it becomes more established and has a definable value. This is very new territory to me.
I think the "Open Source Coordinator" for the project should mint a new brand of erights. The coordinator can then set bounties on the outstanding bugs and feature requests, payable in the new brand of erights.
I think the issuer should be the Squeak Foundation. Is it possible for a non-profit organization to issue stock? Does it have an ownership concept?
For example, you want some squeaker to translate my doc-code implementation to Squeak. Decide how much that is worth to you, relative to the rest of the e-squeak effort. Post a bounty for the implementation, payable in e-squeak rights. Do the same for all the tasks in your bug/feature tracker.
I was thinking that this comes after an initial issuance. Everyone involved should start out with ownership and voting rights, although the implications of that could be a bit hairy. We should discuss it further if people think that this is an interesting direction.
If people would be interested in using such a system, I would be interested in building it.
I don't want to discourage you in the least. Part of my thinking in building this in squeak would be that it would provide a good impetus for building a system to support it. Damned manipulative of me isn't it? :)
If there is any possibility, that we can't address, of this suggestion derailing the effort to produce such a system, then I will want to call it off. This suggestion is not meant to detract from why we all gathered here in the first place.
That we have gathered into a list is the most important and really amazing thing that we have all done this month. We have a new mailing list, with over 20 participants, less than 24 hours into it, for the purpose of building a SafeSqueak. I am completely blown away. :-)
So who is going to start the real conversation? Guys, how can we do exceptions with only lexical scoping? Or do we need to have privileged dynamic scoping?
Here is a description of what we most definitely cannot give up in SafeSqueak: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2950 .
cheers, rob
squeak-e@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Robert Withers -
Tyler Close