Is it as straightforward as placing a bet? No. But there are still many more/better ways to do it than, say, going long or short the outcome of an election. Prediction markets shine in contexts like elections because there aren't other good skin-in-the-game metrics. But OSS has things like developer activity, user adoption, $ donations, etc.

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Also: how do you measure success? Elections are easier.

Good point. Linux never has conquered the desktop (unless you count WSL), yet more people use it every day than anyone ever imagined.

Investing your own time in an open-source project is not very different from voting in an election and promoting your candidate and so on. Both kinds of actions give us no clue to whether the project or candidate is going to be successful or not.