more transactions from a future software market

04 July 2017

Previously: Benkler’s Tripod, transactions from a future software market

Why would you want the added complexity of a market where anyone can take either side of a futures contract on the status of a software bug, and not just offer to pay people to fix bugs like a sensible person? IMHO it's worth trying not just because of the promise of lower transaction costs and more market liquidity (handwave) but because it enables other kinds of transactions. A few more.

Partial work I want a feature, and buy the "unfixed" side of a contract that I expect to lose. A developer decides to fix it, does the work, and posts a pull request that would close the bug. But the maintainer is on vacation, leaving her pull request hanging with a long comment thread. Another developer is willing to take on the political risk of merging the work, and buys out the original developer's position.

Prediction/incentivization With the right market design, a prediction that something won't happen is the same as an incentive to make it happen. If we make an attractive enough way for users to hedge their exposure to lack of innovation, we create a pool of wealth that can be captured by innovators. (Related: dominant assurance contracts)

Bug triage Much valuable work on bugs is in the form of modifying metadata: assigning a bug to the correct subsystem, identifying dependency relationships, cleaning up spam, and moving invalid bugs into a support ticket tracker or forum. This work is hard to reward, and infamously hard to find volunteers for. An active futures market could include both bots that trade bugs probabilistically based on status and activity, and active bug triagers who make small market gains from modifying metadata in a way that makes them more likely to be resolved.