% Pinfactory % Don Marti % 2020

Developers would prefer to release software at a high quality level. Users prefer to use software at a high quality level. However, firms are incentivized to release software at a lower quality level than would be chosen by either developers or users.

Pinfactory is a system, based on a futures market, that lets users quantify and hedge the risks of low-quality software, while compensating developers to do the extra work to bring the software up to a higher quality level.

The Pinfactory application. This screen shows positions currently held by the user.

The main idea is to introduce price signals into the peer production of software. This is achieved through a trading market for futures contracts on the status of software issues. Users, who value secure software, gain the possibility to predict outcomes and incentivize work, strengthening collaboration and information sharing in open source software development.

Research funding

This software is an open source implementation of a market design research project described in A market for trading software issues. This work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Digital Technology grant on Open Source Health and Sustainability. Funding for open access publishing of the paper was provided by the University of Nebraska at Omaha Libraries' Open Access Fund.