Dan, Between your letter and this reply, Dennis wrote a better answer than I could have. Yes, we are talking about something beyond Ransomeware. I think you and I are looking at this from two different perspectives - which is good. You are looking out for the developer's interests, I am looking at this as an investor. From an investor's perspective ransomeware has problems: 1. Any money you put into it is gone. You may or may not get your product. You may or may not like the charity to which you have donated. You have no chance to reinvest the money in another product - or the same product with a different developer. 2. There is no mechanism (e.g., a moderator) to make the inevitable adjustments that occur in any sizable project. 3. Not only is there no escrow, there is no real money. This makes it hard to encourage serious developers. 4. The ransom model seems to be geared toward helping developers with ideas find investors. This is good. But the escrow model equally encourages investors to find developers for their ideas.
The escrow model IS more complicated but the structure benefits everyone on both sides of the process - and it scales much better than the ransom model, accommodating all but the largest and most complicated projects. The end product from the escrow model can be either open source or commercial - this must be disclosed at the beginning of any request. Ransomeware does not (as I view it) lend itself to commercial products. Both methods need a Registry (or some other means of communication between investors and developers). I have pledged $100 to start building this registry. Since there is no registry until the registry is built, I volunteer to keep a list of pledges and will find a trusted third party to hold actual funds if we get that far in this experiment. Paul Looney _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution