OSS Watch : Micropayments for Microtasks - Felix Klee, Linuxburg
This is about how you can finance the development of small features in OS projects.
Lecture Notes follow
Lecture Notes
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Micropayments are a few dozen euro / pounds etc.
Microtasks are things like installing software, developing small extensions <1 hour? Note that there are plenty of microtasks available to the world that don't involve open source software.
Existing solutions include things like donations, ad-hoc payments, codeweaver pledges, google answers and so on. There are problems with all of these approaches.
[See Affero for some interesting donor things]
Solution for micropayments needs to be simple, quick, trusted, independent.
Suggested heavyweight solution
This is probably not feasible.Suggests a central hub where requests are posted with details of the payment on offer. One of the important possibilities is that other individuals with the same request can add their payment to the total on offer. Developers need to be able to address tasks and claim the payment for working on them - there needs to be a level of trust etc. in the system.
Suggested lightweight solution
This may be feasibleSimilar to the above, but no payment channels and no hubs. Messages would be posted in public, signed with PGP to establish an identity. URL tags would be used to specify the tasks and payments. Additional requestors can sign up by adding additional payment tags.
This would work better if it was supported / understood by search engines
Something less clunky than PGP would help as well
Guaranteed payments - escrow?
>> Sounds like a web 2.0 thingumy to me. Or an obvious addition to e-Bay... [Martin]