Open Whisper Systems
Many of us have heard of Signal, the privacy oriented text messaging platform that utilizes end-to-end encryption. This was developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS), a project started by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike and propelled by the community.
In this blog I'd like to talk about another project by OWS, one that changes the incentive system of donations and money control in open source projects. This project is named BitHub.
Open source projects are meant to be open to the community and including of anyone who wants to contribute (Bitcoin is open source). Moxie talks about how donations around open source software (OSS) has been of conflicting philosophy. OSS belongs to the community, but donations to OSS inherently has to go to one or two people in control of the bank account. This is what BitHub aims to change.
BitHub creates an automated pool of funds where donators can send their bitcoin. This pool of funds then pays out a percentage (around 2%) when anyone makes a contribution to the project. This creates a system of incentive for contribution while also remaining out of the hands of a few individuals.
https://whispersystems.org/blog/bithub/
This means that each contribution to Signal (a super popular privacy app) is being directly supported by an almost decentralized bitcoin donation system! I think that's really cool.
Relevant Signal Articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29
http://www.businessinsider.com/signal-app-2016-12
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/02/signal-iphones-encrypted-messaging-app-now-supports-text/
Pretty cool, indeed. Can this approach be transferred to other git-based projects as well?
Yes it can! BitHub is open source, so you can use it how you would like. :)