People, let me point your attention to a new kind of business, which has this far been impossible because of lack of adequate technological solutions and the related attitudes to it along with lacking knowledge. In fact, numerous big software projects, which do/should collect their money from many sources are operational already, just like there are many small developments like some dedicated blogs, which should receive support from many sources. As I see it, currently a great deal of failure is going on with both intelligently supporting others' developments and receiving support for own ones. And it doesn't surprise me at all -- how can things be different, when no trust is out there, just like predominantly there is so little knowledge about how much support a given project needs! Even it might all seem just logical to many, who see no failure, as such are the capabilities of the current economy. Quite inevitably, given an understanding about the capabilities of the latest information technologies, reasoning leads me to a conclusion, that a new kind of business is necessary. As various information projects develop and benefit everyone, who copies them in some way and finds them useful, the importance of competition lessens as opposed to importance of cooperation, simply because of more efficient way of making life better. But... Cooperation requires mutual support, which requires trust. How can so many people, who convene around a full spectrum of numerous information projects have a way to know how much support a given project needs, when question is about money? The full answer is too complex to say, effectively it is unique for each project and can differ greatly, however there is an important thing in common for all -- to receive support, open information projects have to provide knowledge of the support, which has been received already. That way there can be some reasonable trust. And it can happen through technological reliability. To understand what I mean by those two words, you have to read my presentation (link given below). In essence, I believe, that technological reliability can solve many problems and I also think, that I've made a bit of invention as for how to achieve it.
If you feel interested this far, you should read this: http://11.lv/files/presentations/2010/OWB/OWB-eng.pdf or, if you would prefer slides, where contents appear incrementally, as if I was telling them piece by piece: http://11.lv/files/presentations/2010/OWB/OWB-eng-i.pdf
To git people: (hopefully this can be accepted there) well, first, thanks for inspiring me with your VCS, also I think, your responses might be valuable, as you're many serious programmers there, you could inspect my idea from technical point of view and give a feedback of what flaws you can see!
Thinking it over for multiple times, I think, those 5 principles are enough an idea to build the relevant software and use it with success... But Internet has a lot more eyes than I do, so, please be critical (but precise)! I'd like to have some confirmation, that my idea can be what I think it is, just like it should be useful to discuss the underlying problem (distributed support) in general.
Development of those software components should be the further discussion, but I think, we are not there yet.
Also, if you are interested in this and happen to use gpg, please do a favour to me: consider that presentation a piece of my content-based identity and, to be sure of the next contents you might read, where I'm supposedly an author and signature file is given (as I'll do for each +- serious work), check the respective signatures against the attached public key (I do my best not to loose the other component of it)! If some mailprogram removes those files, search for 0xDA7B716812463FDFAB8D7A2E9CA777980D745B45 Thanks...