Open source projects, the infrastructure of digital public goods, have long relied on unsustainable funding sources like Github Sponsors, Open Collective, or Buy Me A Coffee. Besides the very few that have reached commercial success by transforming into enterprise SaaS, the vast majority of projects failed to find adequate funding.

Because it is too difficult to keep track of each person's specific contributions. And even when it is possible to keep track of them, it is not practical to compensate each person for every single idea they come up with and every line of email or code they contribute.This same dynamic plays out again and again in different situations and at a much... See more

Something important changed between the 90s and today. If you look at most open source projects now, the distribution of who’s doing the work versus who’s simply there is skewed dramatically: it’s common to see projects where 95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people, perhaps even a single developer, with a long tail of “contributors” who are ... See more