Pasta Science

If anyone wants to keep derivative work from OSS proprietary, they have to set a selling price on it immediately. Owners of the derivative have to pay a percentage of that selling price back to the OSS community as a fee. The derivative work can be made OSS anytime if anyone in public domain pays the selling price. Through this, we can incentivize OSS to always be OSS or at least pay a dividend back to the OSS community.

In our project, we represent licenses for derivative works through NFTs. The OSS community mints these licenses. Anyone can buy the NFT to acquire the license. The license makes the derivative OSS by default. If the owner wants to make it proprietary, they must set a selling price and pay a fee back to the OSS community. At anytime, anyone in the public domain can buy the NFT to make it OSS again.

We built the frontend using JS, HTML, Next.js, CSS We built the backend using Moralis, Solidity, Truffle, Ganache

We did not use any sponsor technology. Of particular note is how we tokenized intellectual property, specifically software licenses, into NFTs.

Software License Lifecycle through the DApp:

1. OSS community mints a limited number of licenses for derivative works as NFTs that they’re willing to have in distribution for their software at a self-assessed price by the OSS community.
2. Any individual or corporation can buy the tokenized license to be able to use the OSS in their derivative work. By default, the license is copyleft such that the derivative is open-source. Making the software proprietary: The NFT of the license for the derivative work must have a self-assessed price set. To hold proprietary, the owner must pay a percentage of the self-assessed price in fees every 30 days. Public re-claiming the derivative work as OSS: The self-assessed price of the NFT license is paid by anyone in the public domain, the NFT license is transferred back to the OSS community,, and the derivative work is forced to be OSS. The owners of the software no longer hold it proprietary and no longer have to pay a fee. Defaulting on payments: If the owners of the NFT license that are holding the derivative work proprietary fail to pay their fees in 30 days, NFT license is transferred back to the OSS community, and the derivative work is immediately made OSS.