Not completely unrelated, Arte TV just broadcasted an excellent "Thema"
about work-salary-profit
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/083305-001-A/work/
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-018077/travail-salaire-profit/
and 4 more languages...

It's not about open-source, but gives some historical perspectives on
retribution/organization of work in the past couple of centuries.
With these perspectives in mind, deconstructing and inventing new forms
sounds like a good idea ;).

Like Jecel said, I don't buy the will to control the usage for ethical
reasons.
What if a contributor of Squeak start to forbid usage to those supporting
abortion, another to those eating meat, and yet another to those taking
plane or working in transport industry, etc...
It's not like I'm against religion, veganism, ecology, whatever. I'm pretty
sure that the intentions are good.
But we want to be protected from such arbitrary restrictions, don't we?

It's also not my religion to restrict access to knowledge. Knowledge is
patrimony of mankind.
The sharing of knowledge and know how is an important property of open
source.

That does not necessarily imply free usage of ready-made artifacts,
including source code, documentation, ...
On the license side, everything is possible, like restricting free usage to
non profit activities.
But then the value for profit activities has to be negotiated.
And I don't believe that the market will ever turn at the advantage of the
producers (the contributors).
Historically, it's always been to the profit of distributors (of services
for the software), today more than ever.
So it must be by organizing services around the code, not by the code
itself IMO.
Maybe that's what you get in mind about a guild?

For avoiding gaming strategy if we ever start to retribute contributions,
every metric creates a bias, but it shall be possible to mitigate by
randomizing or caping the rewards... We're not yet there. Also interesting
is who controls? Elected, co-opted, votes based on contributions? Weight of
older contributions gradually fading away?

Nicolas







Le ven. 18 oct. 2019 à 02:46, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <jecel at merlintec.com> a
écrit :

> Ron,
>
> > So now the hard part.
>
> I started working on this in 1986. Brad Cox tackled these issues in his
> "superdistribution" work. At the time I asked around if people would put
> up with ads to be able to get software for free and the reaction was so
> negative that I didn't expect our world to become what it is now.
>
> > How do you determine the value of a contribution?
>
> By 1997 I was working on the idea of bulding a metering system into the
> virtual memory code. So a contribution (which could be any objects, like
> a drawing of a cat, and not just code) would be rewarded a portion of
> the user's monthly software bill proportional to how much it needed to
> be kept in RAM compared to all other objects.
>
> Distribution would be for free and there would be no cost to having lots
> of software on your disk that you didn't actually use.
>
> As a software stack grows, people are less and less willing to pay for
> the older fundamental parts even though these still provide a lot of
> actual value. So someone might think of forking $90 for just the Trumpet
> WinSocket TCP/IP stack to access the Internet in 1995 but would think
> even $1 totally absurd for just a TCP/IP stack in 2005 when it was such
> a tiny part of an OS. This race to the bottom happens even without no
> cost Open Source competitors, though that does speed things up.
>
> My scheme was meant to avoid this trend as well as make each individual
> contribution values (so you can get money for a single font and not have
> to bundle it with 200 more before you can make any money with it).
>
> > How do you determine the value of the software to a company
> > to determine what they should pay?
>
> The companies wouldn't pay anything at all, but could just build stuff
> on top of other people's works. The end users (which might also be these
> companies, but that is a different story) pay, and part goes to the
> company for its efforts and part to all other authors.
>
> -- Jecel
>
>
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