Sam Ragsdale
@samrags
Founder & CEO at @meritsystems.
Prev @a16zcrypto.
Did my time in big tech, since recovered.
Merit is available today.
Today, we’re launching the Terminal:
Pay anyone and any project on Github.
Merit is the financial stack for open source software. We built the Terminal to make it simple for anyone to build enduring projects.
Any Github user can use it today. Any open source builder can sign up for the payments beta.
Open source
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Merit is available today.
@rfs and I started building projects together over 10 years ago—side projects built to amuse and grow our skills.
We learned to code by reading millions of lines of code written by humanity's best engineers on GitHub. This is the marvel of Open Source.
But there's never been an economic mod...
Today, we’re launching the Terminal:
Pay anyone and any project on Github.
Merit is the financial stack for open source software. We built the Terminal to make it simple for anyone to build enduring projects.
Any Github user can use it today. Any open source builder can sign up for the payments beta.
Open source
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Went to Denver for the OSS Summit with @mason.
Three big takeaways:
- OSS remains the best form of distribution for enduring dev tools. OSS is non-negotiable deep in the stack.
- Everyone is excited about the open source infra enabling AI. The tech is so deep and specialized that the industry has converged around hig...
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Cline and Roo are fully Open Source Cursor competitors. Today they're doing over $7.5M MRR on the Claude models alone (via @openrouterai). Their take rate? 0.
It's unprecedented in the history of computing for the infrastructure layer to accrue all the value.
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@merit_systems is the vision I've had for crypto since I entered the space through UniswapV2 MEV back in 2021.
Blockchains are good at settlement. The largest market for settlement is not memecoins but labor. The most productive category of labor is Open Source Software.
Very proud to unveil @meritsystems alongside ...
Today we're coming out of stealth and announcing a $10M fundraise to accelerate Open Source Capitalism.
Open Source is civilization's greatest accomplishment. Where corporations fail to innovate as they scale, Open Source leads the frontier.
All of the best technologies, from databases and web frameworks to cryptogr
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Awesome effort to make the hidden network of open source work legible. OSS is an engine of tremendous economic productivity.
Deep Funding builds a weighted dependency graph of the open source ecosystem to enable fair, automated payments for sustaining developers.
$170k is meaningful, but once fragmented across hundre...
Deep funding combines two ideas:
1. Value as a graph: instead of asking "how much did X contribute to humanity?", ask "how much of the credit for Y belongs to X?"
2. Distilled human judgement: an open market of AIs fills in all the weights, human jury randomly spot-checks them
https://x.com/TheDevanshMehta/status/186
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