Funding Open Source In The Blockchain Era

Exploring the Design Space: Inflation Funding, MicroTransactions, and More

In ERC 1789, I advocate for aggressively increasing funding for the Ethereum commons.

In this “moonshot” ERC, I advocate for inflation funding (as a starting point, 20% of the issuance rewards) to go to an organization, which fits our community values, to fund ETH 1.x, ETH 2.0, and other worthwhile projects.

While you can read the EIP for more on why I think inflation funding is worth pursuing, the TLDR is that:

1. Ecosystem stewardship is important.
2. New, better funding mechanisms exist.
3. It is possible to decentralize fund administration.

The narrow goal of the EIP was 20% issuance going to projects building great, mission-critical software, the broader goal was as follows:

My goal for this ERC is to establish a strong argument for Ecosystem Stewardship. It is the most important driver of long-term value creation in the Ethereum space, and open source communities more broadly. Rewarding maintainers of Ethereum is critical. I am willing to die on this hill.

The Ongoing Fight For Open Source

There is a rich cultural legacy here, dating back 50 years. The baton passed from Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, to Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds battling for operating system dominance in the 90s, to Mozilla and Linux, and countless other software projects we use daily on the internet.

If you haven’t already seen the movie Revolution OS, I recommend adding it to your queue (It’s free on Youtube). We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

“Revolution OS” tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against Microsoft and created GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.

To read the rest of the story visit: https://gitcoin.co/blog/funding-open-source-in-the-blockchain-era/