Fair bitcoin donations for open source projects
Imagine if you prefix your open source license with bitcoin addresses of major contributors with their designated shares:
Copyright (c) 2013 MyProject Developers
Send donations to these addresses:
1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T 750 Alex Johnson
139FpKh63Vn4Y73ijtyqq8A6XESH8brxqs 200 Mike Brown
1PNvbXZFysxvx3252w9JHMa7zbG95snqnm 50 Jack Howard
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,
including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
A bitcoin wallet app may parse each line as 1) bitcoin address, 2) number of shares and 3) a name of the person separated by spaces. Any amount entered by the user will be split in proportion to the number of shares and will be sent in a single transaction.
Initial developers will decide how they split shares among themselves and how they grant them to new contributors. Every user will see how money will be distributed before payment. This removes great amount of “budget management” politics. If developers cannot come to a “fair” distribution of shares, they will not get any donations at all (because they’ll get them only after they decide how to split the earnings).
Usually, every project starts with a single person, who puts his bitcoin address right in the license, so anybody can send him a “thank you” payment. When another contributor joins and initial developer wants to share earnings with her/him they decide on share distribution. When third person joins, both previous shareholders decide who gives up how many shares in favor of a newcomer. Every developer is always free to redistribute his own shares to whoever he wants without asking permission of other shareholders.