DeGit - Incentivize open-source development

Motivation

The worldwide open-source development community has given rise to numerous production-ready frameworks, libraries and tools. Many of these are free for commercial use, yet actively maintained by the community. While developers working on open-source projects are often self-motivated, we believe they should be rewarded for their contribution to the world. Hence, we propose Degit, a decentralized Git-based version control system with a reward mechanism, to give back to the open-source world.

Key Ideas

• Git-based version control: Degit is based on Git, so developers do not need to change their workflow.
• Peer-to-peer repository hosting: All the codes will be uploaded to IPFS. The states of the repository will be persisted in OrbitDB, an open-source IPFS-based database protocol.
• Free to use: While Degit is integrated with Solana blockchain, it can also be used without using token. In other words Degit is a Web3 counterpart of repository hosting solution.
• Repository as an organization: A repository owner can publish his / her repository as a DAO. Then they earn rewards based on their development activities in the repository. Other users can join the DAO by acting as investors, by investing tokens in the repository and gain returns on investments.

Implementation

Currently, the project is in very early development stage, so expect bugs, incompleteness and other issues. Also expect there can be major rework in the very near future that can completely change the design pattern.

Conceptually, Degit consists of the following components:

• Desktop Client (Electron): A desktop application that provides a GUI for users to interact with Degit. The reason why we plan to use a desktop app instead of a web app is mainly because we need to execute Git commands behind the scene and such that we can have finer control on IPFS and OrbitDB.
• Git Server: In order for users to directly manage their codes using Git, we provide a Git server that runs on the user's machine, with some tweaks such that the states of the repository can be persisted in OrbitDB and the code bundles can be uploaded to IPFS.
• OrbitDB: Persistence layer of the application - all data that is not on-chain is stored in OrbitDB.
• Web3Auth: Providing wallet key management for the user.
• Solana: The desktop client interacts with the blockchain to update the DAO's related information that is required for calculating rewards.
• Reward Program (Not started to implement): The reward program is executed in certain time intervals, which picks up the on-chain DAO information and repository activities to determine the reward.

Demo / Testing

At this stage, it is suggested to run the front-end and back-end separately instead of running the entire Electron app

To run the client and server individually, run the following command:

cd electron
npm run test-client  # This starts the React server
npm run test-server  # This starts the Express server and IPFS daemon

If instead you want to run the Electron app, use the command below:

cd electron
npm start

To build the Solana program:

cd solana 
sh build.sh -d dao

To deploy the Solana program to the cluster:

cd solana
sh deploy.sh -d dao