Funding Open Source?

$BLEEBZORX chart

Most of the world's software infrastructure is, or is based upon, open source. The developers and supporters of some of it, for example the Linux kernel, and the major compilers, are paid by technology companies because they are critical to their business. Other, less visible but similarly critical parts are supported by lone volunteers. Apart from the unfairness, this can lead to serious vulnerabilities. Back in 2018 I wrote about one such vulnerability, the event-stream hack, in Securing The Software Supply Chain

The attackers targeted a widely-used, fairly old package that was still being maintained by the original author, a volunteer. They offered to take over what had become a burdensome task, and the offer was accepted. Now, despite the fact that the attacker was just an e-mail address, they were the official maintainer of the package and could authorize changes.

The change they authorized included code to steal cryptocurrencies.

In 2020 I wrote a detailed post about this problem entitled Supporting Open Source Software. Recently the topic re-surfaced on an e-mail alias I read. But what triggered the post below the fold was that this coincided with yet another fascinating piece from Matt Levine and his laugh-out-loud follow-up the next day.

In Supporting Open Source Software I discussed Cameron Neylon's 2017 paper on a related problem, Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us:

Neylon starts by identifying the three possible models for the sustainability of scholarly infrastructures:

Infrastructures for data, such as repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards are public goods. This means that finding sustainable economic models to support them is a challenge. This is due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of the infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it. The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compulsion (often as some form of taxation) to support the infrastructure; the provision of non-collective (club) goods to those who contribute; or mechanisms that change the effective number of participants in the negotiation.

In other words, the choices for sustainability are "taxation, byproduct, oligopoly".

"Taxation" in this context means some mechanism for compelling some or all users to pay. I summarized these choices thus:

• Taxation conflicts with the "free as in beer, free as in speech" ethos of open source.
• Byproduct is, in effect, the "Red Hat" model of free software with paid support. Red Hat, the second place contributor to the Linux kernel and worth $34B when acquired by IBM last year. Others using this model may not have been quite as successful, but many have managed to survive (the LOCKSS program runs this way) and some to flourish (e.g. Canonical).
• Oligopoly is what happens in practice. Take, for example, the Linux Foundation, which is:
  

  supported by members such as AT&T, Cisco, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Orange S.A., Qualcomm, Samsung, Tencent, and VMware, as well as developers from around the world

  It is pretty clear the the corporate members, and especially the big contributors like Intel, have more influence than the "developers from around the world".

On the e-mail list my friend Chuck McManis argued for taxation, writing:

Rather than "free" software, you need "community" software. The users of that software are taxed proportionately to their use and the taxes are used to fund maintenance. Using a progressive tax like income tax you can adjust the cost burden from 'free' for people who are not creating value with it, they are just using it. To 'high' for people whose entire enterprise wouldn't exist if they didn't have access to it. That means and enforceable requirement to pay, and an IP protection structure that prevents theft by simple translation.

It is unfortunate that many technologically oriented people are not thinking more deeply about macro economics as solutions to this problem where "open source" used to be "roads" or "sewers" or "electricity wires" or "ship harbors" were things used by everyone but needed to be paid for and maintained.

Source

My response was that Chuck's examples taught both positive and negative lessons:

The thing that we know from long experience with the mechanisms for funding physical infrastructure like these examples is that over time they work less and less well. One only has to drive on California roads to know this is true. It is why most of the bridges in the US and elsewhere are life-expired (see Fern Hollow Bridge).

Thanks to inflation and feature creep the cost of maintenance increases faster than politics can increase the funding for it.

But the very next day Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" Bloomberg column Memecoin Venture Capital described a funding mechanism that Mancur Olson hadn't considered:

You launch a project, and it has a name, The Bleebzorx Network or whatever, and it has some business plan, and if the plan works it will make money. And then you go out to investors and you say “buy some Bleebzorx Tokens if you believe in my project,” and the investors are like “oh you are a smart founder and your project sounds good, we are interested, what do we get if we buy Bleebzorx Tokens,” and you say “well you get Bleebzorx Tokens.” And the investors, if they come from traditional financial backgrounds, say “no we know we get that, but like, what economic rights do these tokens have? What is their connection to the underlying project?” And you say “oh, nothing, they are just tokens. They just have the same name as the project.” And they say “well will you share your profits from the project with the token holders,” and you say “lol absolutely not.” And they say “well then why would we pay for these tokens? Even if the project succeeds beyond our wildest expectations, why would that make the tokens worth money?” And you say: “It just will. People will be like ‘oh, the Bleebzorx Project is good, we’d better buy some Bleebzorx Tokens.’ So they’ll buy tokens and the price will go up. They won’t overthink it, so neither should you. Just buy the tokens and you’ll make money.” Loosely speaking, these tokens are called “meme tokens,” or “memecoins”: They have some memetic association with your project, but no economic rights.

The context for Levin's discoveryof this innovative funding mechanism was that:

On Jan. 1, Steve Yegge, a famous software developer and writer, announced a project called Gas Town, which you might approximately describe as “an IDE for vibe-coding.” People seem to like it. Yegge did not raise a bunch of money to build Gas Town; he built it himself, apparently for fun. His plans to monetize it were, as far as I can tell, quite vague, in that optimistic open-source-y “if you build something cool the money will work itself out” sort of way. (“I’ve already started to get strange offers, from people sniffing around early rumors of Gas Town, to pay me to sit at home and be myself,” he wrote, though also: “I shared Gas Town with Anthropic in November.” If you build something cool in artificial intelligence these days, the money really does work itself out.)

The way it did " work itself out" was fascinating. Yegge got a LinkedIn messagea:

The LinkedIn message said that someone had set up a token “for” Gas Town on a crypto platform named, delightfully, Bags. The way Bags works is that anyone can set up a memecoin, and then maybe people will trade it, and if they trade it the platform will collect fees, and whoever sets up the memecoin can collect those trading fees, or direct them to whomever she wants to get them. So someone set up a Gas Town token — “$GAS” — on Bags, and directed the fees to Yegge. Millions of dollars’ worth of $GAS traded, for some reason, generating tens of thousands of dollars of fees waiting for Yegge.

Yegge is a good writer and his account in BAGS and the Creator Economy is worth reading in full.

The next day Levine returned to the story:

In describing this mechanism of financing through memecoins, I made a joke about “The Bleebzorx Network,” so of course someone launched that on Bags. The royalties (i.e. trading fees), apparently, are directed to my X account. I don’t know what that means, exactly; I assume that it means that I can collect the royalties and no one else can. I have not collected the royalties, I do not know how to collect the royalties, and I would not collect the royalties even if I could. (As of noon today they were about $9,500.)

I think "OK, that's a good joke". But then I read on for the full ridiculous situation:

1. I have no involvement in this and do not endorse it. I suppose I should have anticipated that something like this would happen, but I honestly didn’t.
2. While I do not give investing advice, this is obviously dumb and I personally would not, and will not, buy any $BLEEBZORX. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, if you do buy it, you will definitely lose 100% of the money that you put into $BLEEBZORX, and also your self-respect and the respect of your loved ones. “Ooh I bought Bleebzorx tokens,” listen to yourself.
3. I am not going to collect the royalties that are supposedly accruing in my name.
4. That said, I do understand that memecoins run on attention and that, by writing about this, I might increase its price and volume and thus the royalties. (“Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it,” Yegge wrote.) I also recognize that many of the people who emailed me to tell me about it probably own $BLEEBZORX coins and were hoping that I would write about it so the price would go up. I am writing about it for journalistic and amusement purposes, not to pump it, but I recognize that in doing so I might be pumping it.
5. I am trying not to! I really truly do not want you to go around trading $BLEEBZORX for speculation or to generate royalties for me, for a variety of reasons, including (1) I will not collect the royalties so you’re not doing me any favors, (2) the thing above about people ruining their lives by being associated with memecoins and (3) I like to think that this column is a classy establishment and I would be very embarrassed if my readers were going around falling for dumb memecoin pumps.
6. Because memecoins thrive on attention, I am not going to write about this again. I will pay no more attention to $BLEEBZORX, so you should not buy it to bet on my continued attention.

Levine understands that there is a darker side to this:

But, for another thing, Yegge eventually posted about it. Not — apparently — because he had anything to do with its creation, or because it has anything to do with Gas Town. But because someone sent him a LinkedIn message about it, and the LinkedIn message promised him money, and the money was there. So he posted about it, knowing that doing so would drive attention to $GAS, which would drive more trading of $GAS, which would make him more money. “Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it,” he wrote, correctly. (As of about noon today it had generated more than $290,000 of earnings for him.) That’s how memecoins work! You own them, you tell people about them, you get richer.

So Yegge got $290K richer by pumping $GAS. But Levine asks the real question:

Why did someone do this? Why did someone create $GAS, and why did they (or someone else) message Yegge about it? Why did the creator allocate 99% of the trading fees to Yegge, rather than keeping them for herself? Presumably the creator gave Yegge the trading fees to (1) make it seem more legitimately connected to Gas Town and (2) entice Yegge to post about it. And presumably the creator kept, not the royalties, but a lot of $GAS coins for herself. You set up the coin, you distribute some, you keep a lot yourself, you generate some royalties, you send it to Yegge, you get him to post, the coin goes up and you sell at a profit. The price of $GAS spiked from less than $0.01 to more than $0.04 when Yegge posted about it, peaking at a market value of about $40 million. (Then it collapsed again and now it’s back below $0.001, which is the normal fate of a memecoin.)

Yegge and the promoters of $GAS got richer through a classic cryptocurrency rug pull. David Gerard is all over this in Steve Yegge’s Gas Town: Vibe coding goes crypto scam. He starts with the background:

Steve Yegge is a renowned software developer. He’s done this for thirty-odd years. Senior engineer at Amazon then Google, blogger on the art of programming. Yegge was highly regarded.

Then he got his first hit of vibe code.

In March 2025, Yegge ran some old game code of his full of bugs and sections saying “TO DO” through an AI coding bot — and it fixed some of them! Steve was one-shotted.

The decline was sudden and incurable. He even cowrote a book with Gene Kim called Vibe Coding. Well, I say “wrote” — they used a chatbot for “draft generation and draft ranking”. They vibed the book text.

Yegge and Kim also worked on the DORA report on vibe coding. That’s the one that took people’s self-reported feelings about AI coding and put the vibes on graphs. Complete with error bars. Vibe statistics.

In the book intro, Yegge straight-up says:

It’s like playing a slot machine with infinite payout but also infinite loss potential.

… I’m completely addicted to this new way of coding, and I’m having the time of my life.

Generative AI is all about generating an addiction, as I've been pointing out for many months. And addictions cause irresponsible behavior:

Gas Town is a vibe coder orchestration tool. You get a whole bunch of Claude instances and you just set them to work on your verbal specification. Yegge’s described it as “Kubernetes for agents.” I’d say Kubernetes for sorcerer’s apprentices.

Gas Town is a machine for spending hundreds of dollars a day on Claude Code. All the money you’ve got? Gas Town wants it:

Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from.

Yegge’s an extremely experienced professional engineer. So he put care into Gas Town, right?

I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.

Of course, as Gerard points out, the code is probably riddled with vulerabilites that someone who does read the code can exploit. But the irresponsibility is also financial:

Crypto bros have been pulling this scam for years. They say “please publicise our thing about you.” Then the scammer runs away with everyone’s money.

Developers consistently tell these scoundrels: “get outa here.” But not Steve Yegge, ’cos his brain is completely vibed: [Medium]

Woah, what am I, some sorta dumbass? Well yeah, actually. So I went for it.

… When I see a community of earnest young weird-word-using investors cheering Gas Town on, well, I hope they all get filthy rich.

… I’m not endorsing buying crypto, though I am very happy that people are doing it.

I bet you are.

Source

This is the whole history of the scam:

The GAS token was released 13 January at 1pm UTC. Yegge posted about it on 15 January at 2:45am UTC.

By the morning of 16 January, the price peaked at 4 cents a GAS coin! Then the scammer started dumping the tokens and taking money from the suckers. By 7am on 19 January, the GAS token had been fully pumped and dumped.

A couple of hours before the final dump, Yegge posted to his blog: [Medium]

Gas Town itself needs my full attention … So I had to step back from the community.

That and all the money’s gone. Vibe finance.

This is the attention economy in action, so memecoins are a mechanism for funding open source projects if and only if:

• You are a high-profile member of the community.
• And you are comfortable living on money from degenerate gamblers.
• And either you are happy to run pump-and-dump scams or, apparently like Yegge, are happy to front for them in return for a fraction of the take.

The bottom line is that the suckers who fell for the $GAS scam likely lost some $3M, around 90% of which ended up with the scammers and around 10% with Yegge. That's not a very efficient way to fund open source projects.