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Absolutely not.

Not everything in the world has to cater to Bitcoin.

The Debian/apt ecosystem does not revolve around any cryptocurrency, or even money in general.

Many if not most open source projects don't and are not trying to get donations in any form.

Developers, in public descriptions of their projects, are free to say whatever they want and to ask for any form of donation they wish, be it cash sent trough post, crypto (not just Bitcoin) or a beer when you meet them in person.

Bitcoin/zaps need not to pollute all software in existence.

Daniele 1y ago

Donation is already part of open-source culture, as is sponsorship, as you say. Some is also already built-in, as in Github added it a few years ago already.

Open Source does not exists in vacuum, and money is not going to be abandoned by civilizations any time soon.

Zapping people here - whether they publish a nice NIP or a new release of a software - is by far the smoothest form of distributed support I've ever experienced and it make me wish I could do the same every time I use a nice library and want to buy a drink to the maintainer.

I do not believe everything will just work out of free contributions, as it never really did. All open source ecosystem are "polluted" by sponsorships by some corporations, are they not?

Real distributed support might make everything more resilient and prosperous.

It might not going to be part of the packaging tool per se, or maybe only in a few ones. It might also enable a new economy where license, usage and some sort of subscription is connected.

I will certainly prefer seeing millions of developers and even users zapping to Linux maintainers than seeing Linus Torvalds exiled for a few weeks from his position due to a "recommendation" from a board that suffer pressure from some ignorant mobs.

PS: you seem to be confusing "cryptocurrencies" as something that's real and is even in the same "space" as Bitcoin. Not sure why, but it is not. I say Bitcoin, I mean Bitcoin, not "crypto" or "cryptocurrencies" or any other made up concept.

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Valentino Giudice 1y ago

GitHub is a for profit proprietary platform. Many (certainly not all) public projects on GitHub do happen to be open source (while many others have a proprietary license or even no license whatsoever). Most users and most projects on GitHub don't accept donations. A project can also be developed on GitHub but accept donations trough some system external to GitHub.

Your prediction about money being abandoned is shared by some and not others, which is why a system which isn't designed specifically for those who align with your (or anyone else's) particular ideology need not to be bound to any specific kind of currency. Developers are absolutely free to ask donations in the form of gold and diamonds.

> I do not believe everything will just work out of free contributions, as it never really did.

Except when it does, like in most small open source libraries and even some rather large and widely used ones (see SDL, which only accepted donations for a short time).

> All open source ecosystem are "polluted" by sponsorships by some corporations, are they not?

No, they are not, but it also wasn't my point.

I'm not against projects accepting sponsorships.

I'm against the idea that apt should be loaded with the functionality of monetary transactions in the specific form and trough the specific currency that you wish to support.

Apt needs to do one thing and it can and should remain simple and focused, like most fundamental Linux (or just Debian and derivatives, in this case) utilities are.

You, or anyone else, is free to develop a command-line utility that will deliver donations in any way you wish, trough any currency you wish, which users will have the freedom to either install or not and that those who wish to contribute to programs meant for package installation and management don't need to maintain.

> I will certainly prefer seeing millions of developers and even users zapping to Linux maintainers than seeing Linus Torvalds exiled for a few weeks from his position due to a "recommendation" from a board that suffer pressure from some ignorant mobs.

Linus Torvalds would have had no technical difficulty setting up a donation campaign, if he had chosen to do so. If anything, it would have reached more notoriety, and thus more donations, than any command line utility could ever have provided.

There is no sequence of lines of code that would have changed the situation, because it was a purely social, non-technical matter, one for which Linus himself is arguably in large part at fault.

I too often err towards technosolutionism. It is, indeed, an error.

> PS: you seem to be confusing "cryptocurrencies" as something that's real and is even in the same "space" as Bitcoin. Not sure why, but it is not. I say Bitcoin, I mean Bitcoin, not "crypto" or "cryptocurrencies" or any other made up concept.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

I know (many) bitcoiners hate the existence of other cryptocurrencies, but so what? That's a purely ideological matter.

Bitcoin isn't inherently better in a technical sense and I see no reason developers of package utilities should cater to bitcoiners any more than to those who support any other open source cryptocurrency.

Of course, all cryptos are made up, as is fiat, and as is Bitcoin.

Daniele 1y ago

I'll start from the end.

1) Cryptocurrency or "crypto" has just become a word to describe alternative versions of Bitcoin - which are all failed experiments or - mostly - scams.

Bitcoin is a peer to peer electronic cash system and the word cryptocurrency is not used in the white paper at all. Also blockchain is not used, still people used that word for everything.

It might be ok to use it in casual conversations? Yes. But Bitcoin is NOT a cryptocurrency because there is no such thing as a crptocurrrency.

2) I see your general point about software stay agnostic from value transfer of any kind, including Bitcoin in any form. My post - which was not a scientific paper rather just a "thought of the moment" - is about "hey, maybe it should". And even if I see your points and mostly agree, at the same time I think it might be better the other way around. Bitcoin can be transformative in the way humans interact, and zaps here are a first example. I totally see that happening for books, articles, chats, videos, songs and, yes, software packages and software apps and so on...

Why embedded? Because if that means more money flow and flow from consumers / users to producers / makers... that's a good thing as the outcome is important.

There are downside? Probably. Again, it was just a shout, open for discussion. Glad to have this one.

Valentino Giudice 1y ago

For something to be "failed" it needs to have an objective first and then fail at that objective.

I'm rather confident many people have failed at doing what they were trying to using pretty much any kind of technology or software.

If the whitepaper doesn't contain the word "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain" it, naturally, doesn't get to define those terms.

According to Wikipedia, the a cryptocurrency is "a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it".

Bitcoin is a digital currency (in the sense that it's digital and it can be used for the purposes that currencies have), it is a medium of exchange (people buy and sell items and services trough it) and it is not reliant on any central authority (because it is decentralized), not even a government or a bank.

It is a cryptocurrency by definition of the word.

Now, you might think all other cryptocurrencies are to be rejected, and ought to fail.

That is a matter of opinion, which I am neutral about (I do not care).

It isn't a matter of language or ontology.

Are those concept all made up?

Of course they are. All words are, all human concepts are. Concepts that can be communicated are all made up and everything in relation to computers is made up.