Yeah, I shamelessly stole the topic title from mrb, but I didn't had the creativity to find another one. mrb can sue me for copyright if he wants, just PM me.
More seriously, I'm really interested in the work of eldentyrell, and after reading some reactions, I think I have an interesting proposition. One thing that bothers me is that, all the time eldentyrell will spent on his server, to be sure he get paid correctly, he will not be developing a better bitstream. It's bad management of our human resources here. You take an awesome bitstream developer, and you convert it to a server manager where a lot of people can do this job.
So, I'm asking to the community here. Is it possible to create a pool-like server for exceptional contributors? The idea is simple. Take eldentyrell idea of a server, but apply it for every exceptional contributors. The server could be managed by a group of person from the community, or even maybe the currently pool managers of existing big pool (like Deepbit, Slush, etc.).
This way, exceptional contributors, like eldentyrell, could simply submit their project to this server, where the server managers handle the rest. I suggest this because I think it could be useful for other developers around here. An example could be the developers of cgminer. If you use cgminer, you send 1% to this contributors-pool where they can have a profit from their work. CGminer being open, it could hard to code into the software, but the pools could simply make a 1% cgminer contribution, where any miner using cgminer will see their 1% being sent to the cgminer account on this contributor-pool.
It is a pool for developer-only, where the miners send their rewards to developers. The goal of it is to let developers concentrate on what they do best, where servers managers handle the pay for these developers.
I know some of them use donations, but I'm not a fan of that. I like to pay proper dues for those who make great work. The donation don't set prices, and it's always hard to evaluate the real value of something.
The payment model could work like a contract. The contributor submit his work with a contract value where he estimate what could be a proper compensation like, eldentyrell submit his work and consider it worth 500 GHash, well, the server will repay him until he gets all of his 500 GHash, after that, the software is free. If he makes a new update, he could ask for like 50 GHash more. ckolivas come after that, he announces CGminerX 3.0, where he ask 100 GHash, and he goes through the same process. This information would be public, so miners could choose easily which software they want to use.
Well, this need to be discussed further, but I'm curious of what the community thinks of it.
