I agree with you. Of course you could have a GitHub Sponsors that would work fundamentally similar to a DAO. Then the question is - why do you think it doesn’t?

Data immutability and decentralisation helps this use case from my point of view for a very simple reason - because if you’re a developer it means no one can in the future just remove you from the list of people who will get money for contributing code in the past, and that users/community can determine to approve your contributions to the repo instead of some centralise core team, who may or may not decide to let you reap the rewards of the repo.

If your code is being used, you get paid period. The community gets to vote on who gets paid for what, certainly, and you can easily prioritise features in the roadmap by just letting people place their tokens/rewards on certain features and let developers figure it out.

Maybe the NFT idea is pretty silly. Actually what I should have said is - MakerDAO already built this and I can see it being applied to other pieces of software. The system works, so far. Users get tokens, they use those tokens to reward developers for their work, they can ask developers to prioritise a feature by pooling their tokens as a reward, any developer, core team or not, who solves that feature gets paid, and any significant contribution as determined by the community gets to reap protocol rewards for a while.

Look at the synergy you can have between the users and developers, and look how it’s all being done in a fully decentralised and permission less way. Anyone can contribute, users pay for features, and everyone reaps protocol rewards for as long as its used. Could GitHub sponsors do that? Maybe. But a DAO might actually be a better way just because it’s trust less.

Now I agree with you it’s Rube Goldberg-y. The thing is blockchain solves trust issues, not tech issues. A DAO with reasonable rules sounds inefficient, but it’s more capable and adaptable than any centralised solution.

I’m not sure why it’s so hard to understand. Basically you are building an open source piece of software where people get paid to contribute, irrelevant of their background, location or previous history. Users get to be in control and developers get to be paid to make open source software. MakerDAO already does this. Again - is this something Sponsors can do? And if it is, then why doesn’t it?

Isn’t the idea that any developer can make a commit to any piece of open source software and get paid for it, not only once but recurrently, far more interesting than our current system of “work for company get paid”? Isn’t it phenomenally more interesting if one could live their life looking around for interesting things to do, fix them, and get rewarded for it?

Let’s imagine two futures and an app that’s just been bought - Figma. Figma is a cool app that people worked on, did a good job and the owners (repo owners essentially) sold to Adobe. The whole software is closed source, the developers got paid per time worked, and only 2/3 people made the decision to sell the repo to Adobe. Lots of devs there might not want to work for Adobe, but did they have a choice? The repo has been acquired and them with it.

Now let’s imagine FigmaDAO. Same piece of software but it’s open source and run by a DAO. One day you get really interested in image manipulation and rendering. You look into the FigmaDAO feature request/reward roadmap and you choose to implement a much needed feature. The community votes to include your work, and you get paid the reward. They also decide that your feature addition is so important that it will earn you 1% of protocol revenue for 10 years. You are now part time benefiting from FigmaDAO. Suddenly you realise there’s another DAO, GimpDAO where you could use your newly acquired skills to build another much needed feature. You move into that community, deliver the feature and… rinse repeat.

On one of these futures, we carry one as we are and companies keep building piles of closed source software. On the other one, developers become free agents who get to contribute to any piece of software at will and get rewarded for it, without having to go through bothersome tech interviews and just building (permissionless), their contributions are recorded in an immutable ledger that no one person in particular can edit (trustless) and they get paid automatically whenever their contributions are used (programmable money).

Which one of these futures sounds more exciting ?