It’s simple: you only need the wille to rig and the power to freely manifest that will. No matter how elegant the design of a democratic system, or how many procedural safeguards exist, nothing can stop you.
Sad but true—if there isn’t enough power to balance that wille.
May all who value freedom also have the power to defend it.
They are not to blame. Why should they care, when open source itself doesn't care about them? The benefits don't go to the public; they go to those who can use it to build a business.
Simple: you just need the wille to rig and the power to manifest your will freely. No fancy technology, counting systems, or statistical anomalies can stop you. Quantum cryptography is useless in such a case.
Sad but true—if there isn’t enough power to balance that wille.
Perhaps open source should update its license so that businesses profiting from it contribute a small portion of their earnings — say, 1% — to a global fund, whether allocated specifically to the open source maintainers and contributors or to the Decentralized Universal Kindness Income (DUKI /djuːki/) for all lives worldwide.
Still, most of these genius engineers likely don’t care much about such a small sum. They earn the honor and move on, while the charitable benefits flow to those who can monetize the software.
After reviewing the definition and interacting with an AI, I see that it does indeed exclude this type of use. However, I feel these definitions create unnecessary divisions and discrimination.
It seems unfair to projects with open source code under non-standard licenses, as they are prevented from using the term that aligns with how most people worldwide perceive it. The definition has also effectively made an enemy of money, which may be the root reason the author advocates for funding open source like public infrastructure.
Personally, I wish “Open Source” could simply reflect its literal meaning—the one that most people perceive: that the source is open for any purpose, provided the specified rules are met. In my view, as long as the rules set by the maintainers apply to everyone equally, they do not constitute discrimination. You just have to follow the rules of the game if you want to play.
> That wouldn’t comply with the Open Source Definition, which prohibits discrimination against any person, group, or field of endeavor.
If a DUKI-licensed project (similar to MIT, but requiring a business using it freely to “donate 1% of its net profits to a global fund”), how does this conflict with the Open Source Definition and prevent it from being called open source?
This is the discriminatory part. If you made the fee requirement of everyone regardless of the type of organisation they are part of or not part of, then that might be OSD-compliant.
I’m one of those who use it—mainly because it’s cheap, as others have mentioned. I wish Cursor offered a more generous limit so I wouldn’t need another paid subscription. But it won’t. So Trae comes in — fulfilling that need and sealing the deal. This is what we call competition: it brings more freedom and helps everyone get what they want. Kudos to the competition!
I'm not defending Trae’s telemetry — just pointing out the hard truth about why pricing works and why many people care less about privacy concerns (all because there are no better alternatives for them, considering the price.)
By the way, for those who care more about pricing($7.5/M) — here you go: https://www.trae.ai/. It’s still not as good as Cursor overall (just my personal opinion), but it’s quite capable now and is evolving fast — they even changed their logo in a very short time. Maybe someday it could be as competitive as Cursor — or even more so.
It's a good thing, sure, but not that great. Personally, I don't see the possibility of it solving many fundamental human problems.
We could still have war, extreme poverty, starvation, and massive conflicts between different groups... Those stuff probably will continue as today. It could even be exacerbated if the conflicting parties just gain more power…
I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas fees.
I don't really like crypto that much from a currency perspective given its history with scam but I like the technology just a little bit so I built it.
If someone is interested on someway to monetize or I don't know just talk about it, I am more than happy to.
Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail things that can allow you to prove an amazon transaction or tax reciept etc. which can prove human proof so yeah I think its possible.
> I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas fees.
How is this possible? Is it something that EVM-based chains can support? Curious to hear more.
> Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail
Zkmail doesn’t prove that you’re a unique human. Worldcoin does, but it requires trusting a single company with everyone’s iris data, which is quite dangerous, and completely undermines the goal of building a decentralized, trustless system.
The future I hope for is one where our own devices handle this entirely. Imagine a VR headset or future phone using its iris scanner, combined with our social data, to generate a single, secure cryptographic proof. This proof would verify our uniqueness in the world without ever leaking iris data or any other sensitive information.
Its really complicated but I will try to sum it up.
Basically nano cryptocurrency has no gas fees so if you can get even 10^-30 nano, you can technically do unlimited transactions forever (there is some caveat)
You can get such nano from faucets and then you have basically an eternal source of doing transactions.
What are transactions? Transactions are a way of sending money from A public key to B public key
Now what if we actually take some data and parse it into chunks and then we can create a lot of addresses using some vanity generator whose seed we can know
Then we got all the seeds of the vanity addresses whose lets say top 4 letters of the first address can form a word... now we do the transactions and then we take a transaction id and in the end we send money to original account
by that transaction id or that special account we can actually see a loop of sorts and thus tada! we get some data that we can actually store in blockchain itself.. for 0 fees!!
Now what was my use case! sounds really silly but I wanted to use worldoftext and I wanted to prove that I am the first person to write some text..
Now so what I did was take a unique hash of text and then embed it into blockchain.., and since blockchain has some time, we have essentially timestamped some text and we can also prove that we are the owner of the account that created that text...
Oh yeah, I have also created my own cryptocurrency which actually used algorand's vrf function with it to create a sort of way for randomness to be integrated in it too/ in sense create a cryptocurrency too with this usecase lol
Side note: in order to improve the efficiency you could lose the 10^-30 nano to send to a completely different account which we don't control and since most faucets give like 10^-10 nano ish and like honestly, that is a more practical approach
How is nano still alive? because for each transaction the person doing the transaction has to do some work function, I recommend the 2nd latter approach but I like both approaches. I have some bun code which can automate this whole thing too and Its all on github and uh my practical approach is with me T-T, I think I legit accidentally deleted it but uh yea I built it using claude and its kinda Ai slop but it works :/
Someone gifted me the domain name for my work and some dollars too, Y'know.. I personally feel like the thing that I did was really innovative and I am the most proud of it but I personally feel like the decentralization aspect would never make me earn a single cent out of it and that's okay to me but I don't have too much money and I wish someday that I could work on such things without thinking about money :/
Fun fact: nano cryptocurrency creator actually said on reddit that such behaviour is unintended and that's exactly what I like doing.. Doing unintended things to do something useful.
Thanks for sharing this. The method of encoding data through a looping chain of transactions between vanity addresses is particularly clever. Truly a innovative idea.
Hope to see more practical applications emerge. Please keep us updated should it unfold in the future.
Thanks a lot, well here are some practical applications I can think of personally:
Uncensored forum app (though would be insanely slow and I personally feel like it might lead to some nefarious activities and I was thinking of creating it but I didn't want to be linked to it)
Multi crypto payment while having the same address: we add all crypto addresses into nano chain itself and so then anybody can pay to anybody else in all the crypto address data of different blockchains like eth, polygon , (bitcoin?) , monero without requiring multiple addresses, a single address is enough.
Proving of data (nanotimestamps) could be useful to create a decentralized way of "seeding" other people's data while still knowing that its tamper free using bao (incremental streaming)
so this could theoretically be used for lets say download of archlinux iso without using bittorrent and without trusting any middle man or even hashing yourself. So it can sort of link download links into addresses too.
I was thinking of a social media where such thing could be used and so the underlying stack could be changed to whatever and you can move away just like in did but the did server would actually be a 60 node (nano has 60 nodes from various amount of people so more decentralized and anyone can host their own node too)
All while doing any of this, we can guarantee sort of something like nostr too in the sense that payments can be built in (not sure if its good or bad but its still a feature)
I must admit though, I am just in high school and honestly it made my day thinking that people think what I created to be innovative since I will admit, the code sucks really bad and AI slop but the idea is the one thing I am proud of. Truly an eureka moment I must admit.
I want to be honest, I may have created this idea but its hard for me to monetize it given the decentralized nature. If someone has some more ideas feel free to list it.
Should I create my own blog post about it?
I personally want to work on this project too, get some practical applications but just have no incentive really sadly. I also don't want to generate too much hype on it as if its something revolutionary since only time will tell.
I may sound cheesy but if someone interested in crypto is seriously impressed, please just mail me and I guess fund me for this project and give me ideas on monetization.
Honestly I don't know, I don't want a lot of money. I just want enough money to work on things I like without dreading about studies/college/job cycle.
Lurking in HN, this might be one of the highest compliments out there. So thanks, I appreciate it.
I have created a whole video about it actually too! it was part of some coding competition to explain software that I took part in.
I must admit, I was just babbling since I didn't knew too much of the code but just the higher basics so it would be a little tough watching a video so you might need to hold tight!
Open-source projects often function like a system of charity and honor. The honor goes to the contributors, while the charitable benefits flow to those who can use it to generate revenue. This model works well for both parties and indirectly benefits humanity.
However, I personally believe—perhaps naively—that the charity could be directed toward all humans in a more direct and obvious way. For example, when a project is released under a license, businesses that use it to make money would donate a small percentage of their profits—say, 1%—to a global fund: the "Decentralized Universal Kindness Income" (DUKI /dju:ki/). The business behind the main contributors would be exempt from this donation, or could choose a reduced percentage. This gives them an advantage when big companies use their project to compete against them (the reason why Redis changed its license).
The benefits are clear. Contributors would receive greater global recognition for their efforts—especially from those outside the tech industry—while businesses that donate would gain access to a wealth of open-source resources (if enough high-quality DUKI-licensed projects exist), also earning respect as a marketing strategy. They would likely gain a competitive advantage compared to those who do not.
I've called this concept the “DUKI License.” At its heart, it’s the MIT License with one simple addition: a profit-sharing requirement. Unfortunately, I don’t have the power to market it, and still unsure how it would be received by the very people who steer the open-source world—the project founders and core maintainers
I like the idea. But it is missing something to actually get money out of companies, I think?
Because even when there are people in a company that are nominally willing to pay, there is usually so much friction/hassle to actually get money out of a company - that it most often ends up not happening for open source. Unless there is something that "forces" them.
Hmm, companies often use GPLed software without complying with the license (for eg Vizio is being sued right now), so I wonder why the OSMF situation is different.
Some percentage will not comply. Either in bad faith or just lazyness/incompetence/accident/whatever. But as long as that number is relatively low and a decent chunk pays "their dues", it is not really a problem.
It’s simple: you only need the wille to rig and the power to freely manifest that will. No matter how elegant the design of a democratic system, or how many procedural safeguards exist, nothing can stop you.
Sad but true—if there isn’t enough power to balance that wille.
May all who value freedom also have the power to defend it.