let's say it costs you $100K to fix an open source issue. you are a self funded bootstrapped startup. that 100K is serious money. the same 100K, for a FAANG, is lunch money. the FAANG can take your contribution and compete with you, and put its marketing dollars to work, which you don't have.

"get paid" for open source work typically means become a contractor, paid per hour. that doesn't scale, I'm interested in getting paid repeatedly without any additional effort on my part, rather than getting paid per hour.

it would be interesting if there was a model where a contribution would cost $0.001 to use in a product. if I am a small business selling a product with that contribution in it, and I sell 1,000 products, I pay $1. if I am a FAANG and sell 20 million products, I pay 20K. that sounds like a much more fair situation. perhaps blockchain can enable this. now let's say I am a regular contributor and FAANGs use my software. I can now make let's say ~100K per year from my few contributors from FAANGs without any additional work. that would be pretty awesome.

>FAANG can take your contribution and compete with you

Compete with you on what? using the public goods you created? I still think that is the point. If they can utilize the public good more efficiently and offer its service to users at a more competitive price point than your small shop - that benefits the user.

>I'm interested in getting paid repeatedly without any additional effort on my part, rather than getting paid per hour.

A plumber doesn't get paid every time water runs through the pipe. Coming up with clever solutions to the operational problem is part of the $/hr of doing work.

I guess what it comes down it is are we talking about literal code, or are we talking about something higher level that you want some level of ownership of?

When it comes to code, the logic of the code itself is not where the value is. the reason multiple payments are made for the same set of logic / code is because the value is in the time and place of execution. Owning the overall system the code lives in is all that matters for value. Code itself has literally no value on its own. The value is in the execution.

The thing people pay for is to have others execute code for them. development is part of that.

you still bring up an interesting payment model idea though. I'm not sure how it could work, but there might be a feasible way to have multiple developers work under the same umbrella, with all code being proprietary and owned by that umbrella, and instead of paying them a flat wage they each work as contractors who get paid whenever code they developed gets executed. The umbrella could service FAANG as customers through typical SaaS API model so FAANG never sees the code and the developers themselves get paid on execution instead of FAANG management

Basically what you describe, but as a closed ecosystem - not sure how feasible it would be to insulate it from the general ecosystem though.