That’s a good point - even just making your grant money go further (with partially repayable loans) is very valuable compared to using it all on a one time grant which might fail

Yep. You’re essentially looking for someone willing to buy debt with a substantial chance of non-repayment. Perhaps if these business loans were bundled then you would at least be able to predict with some certainty what percentage of the money you were likely to get back.

One source of inspiration that springs to mind are UK Student Loans, where incomplete repayment is expected (repayment is income-contingent and the loan defaults (with no consequences) after a fixed period of time). You’d think it would be hard to sell debt of which a substantial portion wasn’t going to get repaid. But in the case of British student loans, pension funds seemed to be interested in buying the debt, I assume because the long term predictabiloty of the repayments made up for the incomplete returns [aren’t normal loans predoctable too thouh?]. Anyway I’m getting side-tracked, this might not be all that applicable to startup funding.

Do I understand correctly that he argues that people pay for convenience, which means that by eg. charging for the convenience of using NuGet (and donating some of that to the developers) they’d be willing to pay you even though the software itself is free already?

Ah, very good point.

If your startup fails, you don’t have to pay it back, they take on the risk with you. However, if you succeed, they own you forever.

I see now. I suppose small business loans favor a more tempered approach whereas venture capital better incentivizes a more frantic approach of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. And with a bank loan-based business, a lot of the other incentives get corrected too (no pressure for constant growth => no need to enshittify once genuine growth stops).

I suppose the flaw of the bank loan model is that there’s no certainty that the research will pay off, so as the researcher (ie. prospective business owner), you don’t want to be the one paying for that inevitable risk…

Yeah, I feel like people on here have a bad habit of relating even completely unrelated posts back to US politics. But if you keep reading the news then your brain tends to do that.

I’ve blocked most of it with a keyword filter

Duk. The ultimate, all-purpouse animal.

Absolutely. I was going to suggest TOML as the standardized Linux format as well.

I actually looked into it, although I didn’t like very much that the config file is actually a program and an odd language. They should have used something commonplace like JSON

I also wish Linux used a standardized config file format.