I posted some notes on the dev fund topic here:
Notes on reaching agreement about a potential Zcash dev fund | by Andrew Miller | Medium (just my own thoughts, not on behalf of the Foundation). To summarize:
- The dev fund question is best viewed as a negotiation. It’s a good idea if it adds more value than it costs. The no deal option, where (speculating here) ECC does something else after next year, and others (including Zcash Foundation) do maintenance and improvement, is a fine option, which is good because we start from a good negotiating position. Several other commenters in this post have been discussing along these lines: what would be the cost of a dev fund? If it goes to one entity, how much of that is overhead vs goes to engineers (or other activities like marketing)? What would we want to get out of it? Another upgrade on the same scope/quality as Sapling? Who else besides ECC could compete for this?
- The trademark policy will probably play an important role. While the community (node operators, miners, exchanges, wallet devs, etc.) get the final say on what software to run, “the community” is hard to define precisely and it’s clearly a lot harder to coordinate without at least unity over the name and symbol. Lacking any other better model for community ownership of the trademark, some kind of joint-control between ECC and Zcash Foundation would be a first step. If the Zcash Foundation and ECC enter into a bilateral negotiation over a potential fork, the scope would likely be over which fork (if any) gets to stay called Zcash.
- It’s fairly unclear how best to form and recognize a community consensus but we should try anyway. Options include coin holders vote, community governance panel like we did before, miner vote, combinations of them, or other options. I think any of them are better than nothing, and that in most cases the outcome would not be sensitive to which mechanism we choose. One possibility is a community consensus could start from outside, e.g. a petition or ad hoc miner vote, and be adopted after the fact by the Foundation.
To summarize: My view of an ideal outcome is that ECC and Zcash Foundation agree on a process for recognizing Zcash community consensus, and in case of a fork, pledge to license the trademark to describe the community’s chosen fork. This would serve as the basis for a negotiation between the Zcash community and any potential development firm hired by the community through a new dev fund.