So I’ve been trying to think of ways to improve the software landscape. If we do this it might make traditional software more aligned with human values and it’s models for building more advanced systems too.
One piece I’ve been looking at is software licensing.
Instead of traditional open source, have an easy to get license for a version of software, based on a cryptographic identity. This could make it less frictional to be a bad actor.
This license is checked on startup that it matches the version of the software running (git sha stored somewhere). If it doesn’t the software fails to start. It can also be used by clients and servers to identify each other but does not have to marry up one to one with a person’s identity.
The license is acquired as easily as a let’s encrypt style certificate, but the identity has to part of the reputation system (which might require a fee).
The software might require a license from one of many reputation monitoring systems. So that no monitoring system becomes a single point of failure.
Edit: effective altruism might decide to fund awards for work of software ecosystem engineering with non software engineers as the judges to bring this digital infrastructure to the publics consciousness and incentivise making it understandable as well
So I’ve been trying to think of ways to improve the software landscape. If we do this it might make traditional software more aligned with human values and it’s models for building more advanced systems too.
One piece I’ve been looking at is software licensing.
Instead of traditional open source, have an easy to get license for a version of software, based on a cryptographic identity. This could make it less frictional to be a bad actor.
This license is checked on startup that it matches the version of the software running (git sha stored somewhere). If it doesn’t the software fails to start. It can also be used by clients and servers to identify each other but does not have to marry up one to one with a person’s identity.
The license is acquired as easily as a let’s encrypt style certificate, but the identity has to part of the reputation system (which might require a fee).
The software might require a license from one of many reputation monitoring systems. So that no monitoring system becomes a single point of failure.
Edit: effective altruism might decide to fund awards for work of software ecosystem engineering with non software engineers as the judges to bring this digital infrastructure to the publics consciousness and incentivise making it understandable as well