RE: The Bounty License

I have been doing a lot of research about Open Source licensing in developing company-wide policy. Benjamin Young and I are on the review board when people have or unusual licensing situations. Any license that puts a burden on legal is likely to be a challenge. So, for example, my company is pretty happy for us to use permissive licenses such as Apache, but will only allow restrictive licenses such as GPL in special circumstance with consent from the review board. I am pretty sure that the concept of Bounty Licensing would require our OSS review board to go all the way up to the chief counsel. That creates a real burden for developers because of the time delay. If the money doesn’t come in, then the project is frozen or the developers are in violation.

As far as how to fund development, why burden the devs and license with it? I have been involved in fundraising for a large project. The developers want nothing to do with it. My experience is that it takes a huge amount of time, experience, and some tooling.

Tzviya Siegman
Information Standards Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Nik Kalyani <nik@kalyani.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2018 11:59 AM
To: heather vescent <heathervescent@gmail.com>
Cc: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>; mstone@stonecover.com; Joe Andrieu <joe@legreq.com>; Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>; W3C Credentials CG (Public List) <public-credentials@w3.org>; dennis@miqdigital.com
Subject: Re: The Bounty License

>> I'm just curious if anyone replying, has ever run/raised money on a Kickstarter.

May not be quite what you had in mind, but I built a multi-tenant platform called Walkstarter that helps public schools raise funding using the Kickstarter model for walkathons. So far it has raised over $2.3 million for schools around the U.S. I will be happy to port the code over and make it MIT licensed for any kind of Open Source bounty platform.

Main site: https://www.walkstarter.org/


Sample live site: https://bubb.walkstarter.org


Nik


On Oct 18, 2018, at 8:44 AM, heather vescent <heathervescent@gmail.com<mailto:heathervescent@gmail.com>> wrote:

I'm just curious if anyone replying, has ever run/raised money on a Kickstarter.

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 8:37 AM Nik Kalyani <nik@kalyani.com<mailto:nik@kalyani.com>> wrote:
One of my conference speaking topics is “Introduction to Smart Contract Development.” As an example for the talk, I created a Smart Contract and simplistic dApp for Open Source projects called “Buildstarter” where a feature champion can “register” a feature with a funding goal, and community members can “fund” the feature until its funded or the time expires. It’s not quite the same as transitioning the overall license, but the entire project is here https://github.com/techbubble/buildstarter and I’m happy to work towards moving it to production-grade (it’s only conference talk grade right now).

On the subject of transitioning an entire OS license, there is a fair bit of nuanced legal complexity to it that needs to be managed. I speak from experience of taking an OS project from founding to venture funded commercialization to acquisition. I think there might be some possibility of having a dual license, but transitioning the license might have too many gotchas.

As luck would have it, there is an excellent real-world example to see how a license change plays out including a great community discussion for MongoDB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452


Nik



On Oct 18, 2018, at 12:45 AM, Dennis Yurkevich <dennis@miqdigital.com<mailto:dennis@miqdigital.com>> wrote:

Apologies I missed the initial conversation, could some provide a few examples of items you would want to distribute in this method?

On Thu, 18 Oct 2018 at 02:29, Matt Stone <mstone@stonecover.com<mailto:mstone@stonecover..com>> wrote:
As a SaaS provider, this is an interesting approach.  I could imagine going to an existing customer base and saying we'd like to offer feature X for $n -- if we see enough interest, we'll build it.  When "the appropriate level" is met, that commitment applies to the the bounty.  The company decides if they need more or less than than the total bounty to prove market need and/or make a long term feature investment.  In either case, they would get a head start on the capability.

-stone

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 5:19 PM Joe Andrieu <joe@legreq.com<mailto:joe@legreq.com>> wrote:
How would you like to see it work, Heather?



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------
From: heather vescent <heathervescent@gmail.com<mailto:heathervescent@gmail.com>>
Date: 10/17/18 3:24 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: melvincarvalho@gmail.com<mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
Cc: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com<mailto:msporny@digitalbazaar.com>>, "W3C Credentials CG (Public List)" <public-credentials@w3.org<mailto:public-credentials@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: The Bounty License

While I applaud this concept, it is extremely problematic, specifically in putting all the risk onto the content creator.. Maybe that is not too much of a risk for a developer building code, but it is significantly different for a film producer.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 3:19 PM Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com<mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 at 23:22, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com<mailto:msporny@digitalbazaar.com>> wrote:
Following up with an idea on "how can we fund things in this ecosystem".
The concept of bounties came up.

Here's a simple concept:

Release software, documentation, and specifications under a "Bounty
License".

The license states that the content is free for non-commercial use and
sets a bounty price to transition the license into a FOSS license.

For example, libvc is a Verifiable Credentials library in C++. It is
under a bounty license of $50K, if the bounty is paid, it moves to BSD
3-clause license. I can imagine three companies joining in and paying
that bounty because it reduces implementation risk for them, and they
get the software at a fraction of the cost of developing and maintaining
it themselves. The upside is that the developer is paid for their effort
vs. what happens today (leeching).

This is easiest for software... harder for things like documentation,
videos, etc. Information that once it's out, it's out, is more
difficult. So, for those items, previews are released and the full
version is only released once the bounty is paid.

Bounty prices would have to be above market rates... because the content
creator took on considerable risk in creating the content.

-- manu

PS: I know there are some things that may be better paid for up front,
and we can still do that in parallel to the suggestion above.

love it!


--
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches



--
Heather Vescent<http://www.heathervescent.com/>
President, The Purple Tornado, Inc
Author, A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity<https://ssiscoop.com/>
Author, The Cyber Attack Survival Manual<http://amzn.to/2i2Jz5K>
@heathervescent<https://twitter.com/heathervescent> | Film Futures<https://vimeo.com/heathervescent> | Medium<https://medium..com/@heathervescent/> | LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathervescent/> | Future of Security Updates<https://app.convertkit.com/landing_pages/325779/>



--
Heather Vescent<http://www.heathervescent.com/>
President, The Purple Tornado, Inc
Author, A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity<https://ssiscoop.com/>
Author, The Cyber Attack Survival Manual<http://amzn.to/2i2Jz5K>
@heathervescent<https://twitter.com/heathervescent> | Film Futures<https://vimeo.com/heathervescent> | Medium<https://medium.com/@heathervescent/> | LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathervescent/> | Future of Security Updates<https://app.convertkit.com/landing_pages/325779/>