A new way to fund open source?

- Be open source dev
- Issue a token
- Hold X% of it
- Has 0 value initially
- Award (100-X)% of it over time to folks who contribute code
- Companies then buy token to prioritize bugs & features
- Suddenly, an economy arises!

The basic idea is that the token starts as zero value. There's no ICO, it's just a way for the lead dev to say thank you for people submitting pull requests.

Over time, it organically gains utility, as it becomes a way to pay for the time of people with skill in that codebase.

The value of the token is essentially a bet on how big the open source project will get. If you believe that a project may attain thousands of stars and forks, you buy the token as a way of supporting the devs *and* capturing upside.

Motivated by:
https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046

As @nayafia documented in her excellent book, open source is often very founder-driven. It's sometimes just one key contributor to an important but unfunded project. Tokenization could be a way to give back to people who have given us so much. https://pullrequest.substack.com/p/nadia-eghbal 

One way of doing this would be with http://tryroll.com , which I invested in recently. You'd want to start with individual experiments, but eventually GitHub/GitLab could offer one-click ways to do this. Maybe they even take a cut of successful projects, like Square Capital?