Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable
This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm.<p>First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;danariely.com&#x2F;the-books&#x2F;excerpted-from-chapter-4-–-the-cost-of-social-norms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;danariely.com&#x2F;the-books&#x2F;excerpted-from-chapter-4-�%...</a>) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;natewkratzer.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;market-norms-are-crowding-out-social-norms-and-society-is-poorer-as-a-result&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;natewkratzer.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;market-norms-a...</a>).<p>Now that you have the necessary context, you can understand why I&#x27;m extremely doubtful that VC&#x27;s can realistically have a large positive impact on the open source community.<p>Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. There isn&#x27;t enough money available to compensate for the man-hours invested in open source projects.<p>Open source projects are successful because they motivate contributors with social capital rewards of some kind and because they allow many different actors to combine human resources to eliminate shared costs&#x2F;problems.<p>If some kind of wealthy supervillain wanted to destroy open source the best way to do it would be to inject a lot of money into the system, get everyone to start thinking in terms of how much they will be paid per hour to contribute to the project. It would be peanuts. Now the market norms would eclipse the social ones and they would mostly stop contributing. It would probably also be useful to use the funding power to steer projects towards architectures useful to you and less useful to others, if some of those others are your competitors then it may be your duty to do so.<p>This overlaps quite a bit with the existing naive view of the open source community as a big group of untapped future unpaid interns to exploit as well.<p>This, of course, doesn&#x27;t mean that there isn&#x27;t promise in funding infrastructure projects developed by paid contributors that are donated to the public on completion. Just that mixing the two models almost certainly won&#x27;t work.