Open Tributary. An open white paper on paying open-source creators when the products built on their work earn.

Overview

Open Tributary is a white paper on paying open-source creators when the products built on their work earn. It proposes two pieces: the Open Royalty License (ORL), a license the way open source has MIT, and Open Tributary, a protocol that would track what each app is built on and pay every creator in the chain. It’s a proposal preview, open for community feedback, and a B150 project.

Why I built it

In the last year and a half I’ve built a stack of my own software. Almost all of it started on someone else’s open-source project. The people who write that code are mostly unpaid or underpaid, and the model breaks once millions of people and AI agents remix it every day. That isn’t a moral footnote. It’s a supply-chain risk. Musicians get paid when a song is played or sampled. Software could work the same way.

The essay that opens it, The era of personal software, starts with Gaia: the baby tracker I built in three days when the one every parent we knew used ended its free tier.

My role

I wrote the proposal and the essay, and designed and built the site. It’s written for creators and maintainers first, with builders as the second audience. The flowing field in the hero is adapted from Gateway Flow, a ThreeUI effect (MIT): the original files are kept byte for byte and checked on every build, and the live renderer is my own raw-WebGL adaptation of it.

What it does

• Free until it earns. Personal use and remixing stay free. A royalty is owed only once the product makes money, sized to what it actually earns.
• Paid automatically. Open Tributary would route royalties to every project in the chain and take a small cut only when creators get paid.
• Credit isn’t billing. Reused, adapted and referenced code are different kinds of credit, and a credit alone doesn’t create a royalty claim.
• The flaws, in public. A full section on where it could break: clean-room rewrites, AI rewrites, royalty stacking, how to weigh a button against a whole system, and new gatekeepers.

Decisions and trade-offs

• A river map, annotated. I framed it as a piece of developer infrastructure with an editorial voice, and the brief was a clearly annotated river map: code flows out to products, and value flows back.
• Two openings, one chosen. I weighed a manifesto-led opening against the proposition set beside its diagram, and led with the proposition.
• Black and white, with the flow in blue. The first palette came from a painting: parchment, vermilion, gold, olive and blue. I dropped it for black and white, and kept colour for the flow alone, in blue-white.
• The motion is the argument. Products flow in as lanes, and a keyboard-accessible toggle reverses the current, from code going out to royalties coming back, without resetting a single particle. On a desktop that’s 20,500 particles across 160 lanes in two draw calls; phones get 96 lanes and 10,000.
• From email forms to the open. I started with email forms, then moved the conversation to GitHub, where anyone can challenge a section in an issue or propose new wording in a pull request.

How it’s built

An Astro site with React islands. The hero, the river diagram and the chapter after it share one persistent WebGL canvas, with ten ambient flow compositions for the sections that follow. The canvas pauses offscreen and falls back to static scenes under reduced motion or without WebGL. The royalty loop comes from one list of steps: a diagram on wide screens, an ordered list on narrow ones and for screen readers. A read-only Vercel function pulls the latest GitHub Discussions onto the page. The code is MIT; the writing is CC BY 4.0.

Timeline

• 6 October 2026. The essay, The era of personal software.
• 7 October. The first version of the site, in 26 commits.
• 12 October. Renamed Open Tributary, with its connected mark, the royalty loop, the repository opened and the conversation moved to GitHub.

Where it is now

Draft v0.1, last updated October 12, 2026. Legal text is in progress, and rates, allocation and enforcement are open questions. Nothing is implemented yet. Anyone can discuss it, challenge a section in an issue, or propose new wording in a pull request.