Open Source on crypto rails

Submit
Open Source on crypto railsparagraph.xyz
paragraph.xyz

Open source on crypto rails

Open Source on crypto rails

@ccarella
Herocast is a Farcaster client I’ve been using for quite sometime. I think their first ever funding came from Purple and I have been usin...

Herocast is a Farcaster client I’ve been using for quite sometime. I think their first ever funding came from Purple and I have been using it ever since. It has all the features you expect from a client, including scheduled casts but it’s unique spin is an integration with Hats Protocol that allows you to cast from an account as a team. It also has cast actions so that while you are in your personal Warpcast account you can reply, like and recast casts from your shared account. We use Herocast at CharmVerse.

We create cast threads from the CharmVerse account which is not something Herocast supports beyond replying to your original cast. In contrast X has excellent support for Thread creation and Supercast’s is pretty good too but we need it in Herocast. Luckily, Herocast is Open Source and interested in having new contributors to their repo, so I created a bounty using bountycaster for someone to add it. Is this you anon? If $150 is not a reasonable offer, let me know what it should be!

I’m very interested in how crypto can support Open Source development. We talk about it everyday at CharmVerse. The typical challenge with Open Source development is that there is no compensation for the developers so they will often take a job at a large company that lets them contribute to their project, in a way that is in the best interest of the company. Worse is when a company like Amazon just rolls up all the work without any offer of compensation at all, which is their right in many cases but does not make being an Open Source developer any more sustainable. The next phase of Open Source development can include crypto primitives that make being an Open Source developer an even better financial outcome than working at a Fortune 500. Protocol Guild has done pioneering work on this in trying to reward Ethereum core devs with enough crypto to keep them from making the financially rational move of jumping to work on a protocol who will pay them 5x what they can make as a core developer.

My bounty example is just one small experiment. Open Source bounties are not particularly novel but the ease of issuing and paying them with transparency on the blockchain, all while being connected to the social layer of the Internet maybe.

There are many more experiments to be run. Minting, tokens, protocol rewards, onchain subscriptions and all the other attempts to reward artists and creators will be tried on Open Source projects and in success they jump out of Open Source blockchain projects and into the entire Open Source community.

AI summary of the linked article

The author argues that crypto can help fund open source development, which typically goes uncompensated. Their example is a $150 bounty, posted via Bountycaster, for someone to add thread creation to Herocast, an open source Farcaster client the author's company CharmVerse uses. The author also points to Protocol Guild's work rewarding Ethereum core developers with crypto, and expects onchain reward experiments to spread from blockchain projects to the wider open source community.

No comments yetWhat caught your eye? Start the discussion.