Thanks for starting this discussion, it’s an important one to have.
The free-rider problem you describe isn’t unique to yearn. It’s common in crypto (e.g. here and here) and actually in all public goods like open source software, since free-riding is a public goods problem.
It should be noted though that many open source projects have overcome these problems to succeed. Foundational open source projects like unix and git are what crypto, and most of the Internet, is built on.
So to figure out how to make yearn succeed even though “investors outnumber developers so heavily”, I’d look to how pre-crypto open source, with arguably worse developer incentives, managed to keep developers engaged.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an obvious guide here. It’s worth reading in full but here are some of my takeaways:
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As a community, we should create an environment where developers can work on problems that scratch their own itch.
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We should make it easy for contributors to hand over projects to competent successors when they lose interest, and celebrate them even if they do.
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Community members, even non-technical ones, should think of themselves as co-developers who do early user testing and bug reporting.
Of course this should be done in addition to the many existing funding experiments in yearn and elsewhere: yearn monthly grants, gitcoin-type quadratic funding, larger ecosystem players funding individual developers, etc