Autonomous Blockchain Organization for Sustainable Software and Execution History

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are making it possible to develop crypto-currencies and programmable smart contracts that can work in worldwide trustless and decentralized environments. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that can coordinate the works of crowds of users, developers, and researchers can be built using smart contracts on blockchains. We contribute a decentralized autonomous software organization model and an Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract named AutonomousSoftwareOrg that provides a continuously operating virtual organization for open-source software development communities and users. AutonomousSoftwareOrg provides a project funding mechanism based on crypto-currencies, a decision-making mechanism based on voting, and recordkeeping for software usage citations and executions. Furthermore, software executions, along with their input and output data files, can also be transactionally recorded in AutonomousSoftwareOrg. This enables software execution graphs to be constructed for analysis. An AND/OR graph model of input/output data and software executions is presented, along with analysis algorithms for execution traceability and reproducibility assessment. AutonomousSoftwareOrg is deployed and tested on the Ethereum-based Bloxberg blockchain network which is operated by academic and research institutions, demonstrating its practical viability for sustainable open-source software development.