The open-source movement is inspiring. It's amazing that some of our best technology is developed in the open, and made freely available to everyone.
Despite this, open-source sees chronically underinvestment, because we lack systems that reward people who contribute to the open-source commons. We believe people can and should be paid for their open-source labors of love, and want to make open-source truly sustainable by compensating open-source maintainers and contributors.
We believe that recent developments, especially the advent of cryptonetworks, create such an opportunity. We imagine a world where any open-source project can issue project-specific cryptotokens, called "grain", which act as proof-of-support for an open-source project. Contributors who support the project by building and maintaining it will earn that project's grain, and backers who want to financially support the project can buy that grain, thus funding the development of the project. Furthermore, projects will give 20% of their grain to their dependencies, so that the whole open-source ecosystem will be sustained, from exciting applications all the way down to core infrastructure.
To make this vision a reality, we first need to build a system that can value contributions to open-source projects and assign "cred" to them. The system needs to be transparent, fair, and robust to gaming. It needs to value not only new feature work and bugfixes, but also maintenance and refactoring. It needs to value not only technical contributions like commits and pull requests, but also non-technical contributions like community support and outreach. It needs to sustain consensus within the community, reward collaboration, and value long-term value. It needs to be able to distribute money without losing its soul.
SourceCred is that system. It operates by discovering every contribution to a project, organizing them into a network based on how they depend on each other, and then gives every contribution a score based on the importance of the contributions that are connected to it. It starts by finding contributions in GitHub and Git, and enables communities to add more contributions that might otherwise be missed. It is totally open-source, and invites configuration and moderation by every community that uses it.
SourceCred is still in early stages; you can play with a prototype here. Our foundation is set, but there's still a lot of work to do! If you find this vision inspiring, we'd love to have you involved. Please drop by our Discord, say hello on our forums, or check out our GitHub.
SourceCred is being created by [Protocol Labs]. The project is fully open-source, and always will be. We're proud to be working alongside other visionary groups focused on empowering open-source, including OpenCollective, GitCoin and Open Source Coin.