William Gross has posted Give Away Your Code, But Never Your Time, a potential and/or partial solution to the problem of funding open source projects, which I offered a solution for here. I’ve since heard from people pointing out projects that have actually used the “bounty” approach – I was unintentionally describing something that already exists.

We’ve been solving all these other problems around open source, but not the essential one: how can people get paid for developing open-source software. I believe this is fundamentally important to the future of our field, because open source has proven the ability to produce much, much better software than that produced in hierarchical industrial-age organizations.

Solve this problem, and we’ll see an explosion of value like we’ve never imagined.

Related: A series of very well-crafted short videos titled Building an Ownership Economy.

Please comment if you know of other strategies for funding open source.