What is 'OpenFare' that distributes rewards to developers who maintain important open source software that is not in the limelight?



There are a wide variety of open source software and libraries out there, many of which are developed and maintained by free volunteers. While open source software has a huge impact on society, the lack of return of profits to developers causes various problems. To solve this problem, OpenFare, a tool for distributing appropriate rewards to open source software developers, has been released.

GitHub --openfare / openfare: Micropayment funded software.

https://github.com/openfare/openfare

Funding the Next Million Public Software Contributors | HackerNoon
https://hackernoon.com/funding-the-next-million-open-source-contributors

Nowadays, large international companies also use open source software and libraries in their products, and it is estimated that 'open source software developers bring value of more than 10 trillion yen.' On the other hand, it has been pointed out that many open source development sites do not earn sustainable income, and despite the fact that large companies make significant profits from open source software, they are open. Source software maintainers and contributors have not received reasonable compensation.

Filippo Balsolda, a software engineer working at Google, said that when the zero-day vulnerability ' CVE-2021-44228 ' was discovered in Java's log output library Apache Log4j, only 3 maintainers patched it on GitHub. Pointed out that there were only people. Despite a small number of volunteers working to improve the vulnerabilities that have affected the world, the lack of compensation for maintainers claims to be a problem.



Of course, not all contributors and maintainers expect rewards. However, if a developer who plays an important role in open source software gets burned out, or if he gets sick and leaves development, it can have a huge impact on the world.

In fact, in January 2022, it was reported that Marak , the developer of the popular open source libraries 'colors.js ' and ' faker.js ', released a deliberately corrupted version. Marak's actions are believed to have been due to dissatisfaction with large corporations that did not provide financial support for open source software and only enjoyed the benefits.

The author finally got angry because he warned that large companies could provide financial support without using it free of charge, destroying colors.js and faker.js, which are downloaded more than 20 million times a week, and making them unusable --GIGAZINE



Software developer rndhouse said that attempts by developers to solicit donations and sponsorship with companies have failed, and a tool 'OpenFare' for distributing rewards to developers is on GitHub. It is open to the public at. 'The goal is to fund the next million software content creators,' rndhouse said on his GitHub page, arguing that he could build a mechanism to distribute rewards to maintainers who aren't in the limelight. I am.

OpenFare is a decentralized protocol that defines payment methods for backers and buyers, and can be used by open source or commercial software of all sizes to raise funds. The system consists of an 'OpenFare license', a code-defined payment plan, and a payment management tool across thousands of software dependencies. The OpenFare license is similar to the MIT license , but with the OpenFare license, some qualified users can be set as 'commercial users' and targeted for payment plans defined in the code. Developers can use the OpenFare tool to generate a dedicated file in the project's top-level directory to manage payment obligations across fine-grained payment methods and huge software dependencies.

'With OpenFare, payment plans are defined in code, which means that for commercial users, payment obligations in thousands of software dependencies can be programmatically managed, and for developers, copy. & Paste means you can set it. '' Consider a software library that companies have to pay $ 1 a year for a software dependency tree for commercial projects. Embedded deep inside, OpenFare can analyze the entire tree to find payment obligations and make small payments based on the payment plans defined in the library. ' In the example given on the GitHub page, the remittance service PayPal and Lightning Network were specified as payment methods.



OpenFare is in the early stages of the project at the time of writing, and rndhouse is soliciting feedback on Hacker News and Reddit threads. In response to a user comment that 'it's not clear at this point what can be done other than defining payments,' rndhouse said, 'My goal is to build a community around the idea and get early feedback. It's clear that there are many problems, for example, we don't currently share a payment portal that effectively outsources the infrastructure needed to distribute funds. '

FOSS donations which reach the roots | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29909068

OpenFare: Decentralized payment plans for source available software.: Programming
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/rioihe/openfare_decentralized_payment_plans_for_source/

For OpenFare's efforts, 'the problem is not'there is no proper mechanism to distribute rewards to open source developers', but'no one wants to pay open source developers'.' , I made a mistake in the problem to be solved in the first place. ' In response, rndhouse replied that the purpose of OpenFare is to develop a mechanism for developers to receive funds, and soliciting donations is another issue. On top of that, in today's world where many content creators such as YouTuber and game distributors are paid, open source software engineers have room to ask for their share.

In addition, on the community, 'Is there a way to detect when a user fails to pay?' 'Can a user who avoids a payment obligation be legally liable?' 'Continuously maintain the project. How to adjust the distribution to maintainers who cooperate with, contributors who contributed only occasionally but played an important part, contributors who fixed bugs only once in the past, etc. ”was discussed. ..

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in Software, Posted by log1h_ik