As jacked as it sounds

Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, wrote a great article on “Solving the Maker-Taker problem,” about how Drupal built a system to recognize the contributions of community members and their sponsors. I am not wild about the “Maker-Taker” terminology because it gives me Election 2012 flashbacks, but I don’t have anything better to propose. (It was this post by Ben Werdmuller that brought the article to my attention.)

By transparently rewarding contributions and fostering collaboration, we can build healthier open source ecosystems. A credit system can help make open source more sustainable and fair, driving growth, competitiveness, and potentially creating thousands of new open source businesses.

It looks like there is a lot to like about the Drupal contribution credit system and their approach to community contribution in general.

This idea of how money and other benefits should flow within the free software (and open source) ecosystem has been on my mind for over 32 years and it is frustrating to me that I still don’t feel like I know how I feel about it.

It has been easy, at times, to feel like I have ended up on the wrong side of the deal. It felt pretty good when I made money (a little) from MySQL’s sale to Sun Microsystems. I also feel pretty dumb when I’m working alongside people on open source projects where they’re getting paid and I’m not, or someone else entirely is landing investments and spinning up large companies based on the work of communities to which I’ve contributed.

But this isn’t just a feeling I have encountered in my open source work, it was also something I felt when we ran our art supply store. It was a frustrating feeling to hustle to cut a good deal for a non-profit organization where you know the staff there is being paid a better salary than you could afford to pay yourself, and more often than not they would just rely on the big online suppliers rather than even bring the business to us, the small local business.

Maybe my feelings are complicated because I never managed to become post-economic. My version of becoming post-economic was supposed to be running an art supply store, and instead it turned me sub-economic.