Welcome to the maze of ideas that’s been occupying my mind, only now finding their way to the surface, and to you. I believe that Open Source is now facing an existential crisis and requires a sustainable funding model, and that a decentralized crypto market can provide that solution.
This upcoming series of posts truly fits with the vision of the Mind the gap blog. I’ll be writing about a topic close to my heart —Open Source funding—, and directly contributing to my own mission: enhancing individual and collective human intelligence. The series will be a complex puzzle made up of many pieces and deep reflections I’ve been nurturing for a while.
There is an issue with the modern society’s approach to Work and how it values —or, in my view, fails to appreciate— individual contributions adequately. I am a believer that individuals should be able to live from their collective contributions. This topic finds interesting parallels with recent debates and demonstrations over retirement policies in France —my home country.
My stance on this matter isn’t easily distilled into a single sentence, but if I were to attempt it, I’d say I envision a world where everyone can earn a living from their craft and contribute solely to causes they believe in. Realizing this vision calls for a significant societal shift —a form of ‘de-alienation’— where people feel a real connection to the results of their work, possibly fostered through communities collaborating on projects. Time is the ultimate currency and the biggest investment one can make. No one will get to live twice.
In this context, I’ve been thinking of a market that shifts its focus from pure profit to societal benefit as a method to assess these projects’ value. This concept does not imply a specific governance model for individual projects or society overall. This ‘open market’—a concept I’ll elaborate on in future posts— could support democratic governance, steering individual contributions towards successful (or in other words, beneficial-to-society) products and services.
Open Source communities and projects provide encouraging examples of what this world could look like. Unfortunately, a sustainable business model to back these communities is yet to be found. As it stands, Open Source struggles to survive beyond the umbrella of large corporations and their strategic open-sourced code repositories. Even then, big corporations are giving up on true Open Source. I actually genuinely worry that free, libre, software (“Open Source”) might stand at the precipice of extinction.
My dream? Finding a systemic way to financially support an Open Source world —an open platform to sustainably invest in free software. Meanwhile, I’ll be writing a series of posts related to this subject, in the hopes of sparking stimulating discussions. Feel free to challenge me: I’m on Twitter/X!.
… WORK IN PROGRESS …
Here’s the list of published articles related to this series so far: