[haxplorer]

While their current focus is on badges and rewards using tokens, I see other possible directions for this product that could transform the opensource landscape. The founders seem to be looking at this direction in the mid-to-long term as per a comment on ProductHunt.

The early contributors to an Open source project often go unrewarded when it becomes a commercial hit.

Cases in point - Mongo, Hadoop (Hortonworks), Memsql, etc. started out with a good amount of community support, and later went on to becoming commercial successes. While they recognized a lot of the contributors through various programs, and sometimes hired them in, the others who didn't join their journey full time might not have benefited.

Many other companies start with a "Develop in the open" philosophy now, despite being VC backed from early stages - cases in point Meteor, Gitlab, Appsmith, etc. The community engagement is slightly on the lower side once the project is well staffed. The motivation seems to go down.

What if the contributors could have a pie of the company? A very small pie that is proportional to the importance of the feature or bug fix at that point in time. But, as the company grows, the value of the pie grows. Just like an ESOP, or any token. Could say a project set aside 20% of their enterprise value as tokens, and use them as rewards to drive their roadmap with the community? Higher the importance, higher the bounty. That could change the dynamics around OSS contributions, which are currently driven more by the interest of the contributor more than the importance of a feature or a fix to the project.

I see Aviyel could also potentially drive such a shift.

Saw them on Producthunt today - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/aviyel

The comment referred to at the top of this post - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/aviyel?comment=1785981