Hi @jarvie! First, I really like what you guys are doing and I'm not saying at all, that closed-source projects don't have a place in our ecosystem, I just mean that the SPS might not be the right way to fund them. I agree with what you're saying in general, and most of the projects that bring value to Steem currently are closed-source. However they only bring value as long as they're here, so I think they d rather target investors rather than Steem stakeholders as a whole, in order to get funding.
Steem also has a history of closed source projects milking as much as they can and leaving the platform, and if the whole stakeholders have to pay for this, I think that we need to be sure that the code is here to stay, and not base this on personal trust. Also in the case of SteemWorld, it showed that without code to review nor periodic update posts, it was really hard to estimate what was getting done.
Some of the big voters are also looking at whether a code is opensource or not before voting, that's why i wanted to open this discussion.
About the so-called barriers, I don't think that's a thing, in the end everybody's free to vote according to their own standards.
After the roundtable we had in SF, I think it would be quite possible to fund the development of some opensource code through SPS, that could be used by the different dApps, regardless of their opensourceness.
The big voters have mostly said nothing from what I have seen... I have not seen posts by them... it's been a bunch of developers projecting what they think big voters want. I wish big voters actually communicated their thoughts more.
Right now sps in general is a crap show with everyone making assumptions and everyone seemingly having a different take on things... I think for a while sps just won't work and the return is gonna be top voted for a while.
Like you said everyone seems to have differing standards and theres for example a few people seemingly pushing the open source barrier when whales have not actually stated that is their own standard.
On our proposal we stated what our standard is.
Also if the example of milking steem is the video system then they milked steemit inc and their delegation. I'm not familiar with other projects but I haven't been around forever.
Some of them have said they d vote SW if it would turn opensource. You can check the last post about SteemWorld.
As I proposed in this post, an efficient channel to communicate with the whales (possibly through a Community) would be great to resolve that. Once again, I don't think that I'm pushing a barrier, I'm just writing about what I (and lots of others) honestly think is best, and readers are free to decide by themselves whether they agree or not.
I'm not targeting any project in particular and certainly not yours.
If a closed source project leaves Steem, decide to abandon the project or is suddenly unable to continue maintaining the project, all the previous funds used for development would result to nothing.