A tithe is a donation that many religious organizations ask of their practicioners, paid to support the clergy and other shared infrastructure of the church. It comes from the old english "tenth", because traditionally it was 10% of one's income.
It’s the archaic spelling. I just like it better.
Just as with religious tithes, it's important that there is some widely understood social expectation about the scale of donation. 10% seems unreasonably high for something voluntary, and 1% seems like enough. Companies are welcome to use a larger percentage if they prefer, and we anticipate some social mechanisms that could encourage this.
- Modern companies tend to be extremely scalable. Tiny companies can end up generating billions in revenue. Scaling the tithe by revenue or profit ends up not being sensible at either the top or bottom end of the scale.
- Lots of software-based companies are pre-revenue or profit, but well-funded. It seems reasonable for them to contribute to the maintenance of their open source dependencies.
- In tech companies, R&D is basically software engineers. It's easy to think about the relationship between R&D budget and the value that open source software provides.
- R&D is already publicly reported by many companies. This helps with transparency.
Their public commitment. Companies are collections of people, many of whom are software developers who would want to support this system. This combined with tools that make tythe status visible will ensure quite high compliance among companies that make a public commitment.
protocol (noun):
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3a:: a code prescribing strict adherence to correct etiquette and precedence (as in diplomatic exchange and in the military services)
e.g., a breach of protocol
...
-- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/protocol
Tythe is completely compatible with this. For simple cases, tythe could just support multiple destination addresses. Bigger projects could create something like an Open Collective and have the collective own a single input address.