Artconomy is a platform for making art commissions safer and easier. We provide escrow services as well as a custom workflow to make managing commissions simpler.

Artconomy's values include transparency and freedom. To that effect, we are open sourcing our platform.

Open source software allows communities to better trust the behavior of software by making it auditable by members of the community. It also keeps its developers honest-- if they abuse their constituents, those constituents have the ability to start a new project with the code.

This leads into the primary reason why somoene might object to open sourcing their project: Fear that someone else will 'steal their idea'. After working on this project (and other open source projects) for a few years, I have come to the conclusion that the software written for this business is the easiest part of it. The relationships and community one builds around the platform are much more challenging, and they are what allow your company to survive long-term.

Furthermore, we've invested a lot of work into making a great deal of automation that we HOPE someone will steal for unrelated projects down the line. This is one of the best ways we'd suggest someone contribute-- find the code we've used to automate much of the CRUD operations we do, and break it into a library for others to use.

Over time we intend to improve documentation to make the codebase more accessible (and documentation is a great way to contribute!)

We dislike intellectual property, for many reasons. Generally we think it creates the wrong incentives, and aside from this, enforcement is out of reach for small-time artists trying to make it on their own. In practice the handful of times it's used to help small artists pales in comparison to the destructive capacity it gives large corporations. You can learn more about why intellectual property should be viewed with intense skepticism by watching this video and this follow-up video. The site itself, of course, lets artists set what terms they like in their commission info. We're not forcing artists to join us on this mindset, but we are proving the sincerity of our belief by putting our code out there for anyone to take and use.

Initially we considered using a license like WTFPL, which allows you to 'Just do what the fuck you want.' However in context of the legal system of intellectual property, it became apparent that 'what the fuck you want' might have unexpected consequences. The software could, for instance, be used in a larger context to build software patents. Those patents could then be weaponized.

There does not appear to be a well known proven legal license that can effectively prevent this while still allowing private use and non-distribution. At least, not in our judgement. As a result, we feel the AGPLv3 creates the least harm and best benefit to the community given the legal frameworks in which we live. Until such a time as intellectual property is abolished, the AGPLv3 appears the best license for the job. It nullifies (or, at least, greatly disincentivizes) the capacity to weaponize the code against others in almost any case we could expect this to be done.

Expect some swear words in the code. I wrote this platform because the options for commissioning pornography were abysmal and fraught with danger. Since the code was going to be used to facilitate porn creation, I saw little reason to censor myself in comments, tests, and constants.

That's not to say that Artconomy is only for adult work. In practice we've had just as many (maybe more) clean commissions made through the site, just that it was the case I had directly in mind when building the platform, and so that's reflected in my comments.

The codebase assumes you're running Ubuntu Linux. It should be trivially easy to add support for any other linux flavor (small modifications to the Makefile will do) since dev work happens in Docker. The target deployment OS is Ubuntu. If you want to deploy to an actual webserver, additional work will need to be done, and variables/secrets filled in.

To begin:

1. Create an .env file in the root of this repository, and add in the following variables:

# The secret key is used to encrypt/validate sessions. It must be set for the application to run.
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=random-string-goes-here-please-change
# Set these to the public/private keys you generate from https://www.hcaptcha.com/ or else you won't  be able to register.
GR_CAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY=captcha-secret-key-goes-here
GR_CAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY=captcha-site-key-goes-here
# Set these to the ID and secret from Authorize.net. You can register for a sandbox account at https://developer.authorize.net/
AUTHORIZE_KEY=authorize-net-id-goes-here
AUTHORIZE_SECRET=authorize-net-secret-goes-here
# The following keys will prevent code dealing with bank accounts from working if not set. Register for a Dwolla API
# account by visiting https://www.dwolla.com/
DWOLLA_KEY=key-for-dwolla-API
DWOLLA_SECRET=secret-for-dwolla-api
# Check out the Dwolla API docs to figure out how to create a funding source for the main account. Once you have
# this funding source created and verified, you will need to post the API URL link here. This is the account that payments will go out from. It should be the account Authorize.net payments deposit to, unless you want to run out of money.
DWOLLA_FUNDING_SOURCE_KEY=https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/funding-sources/uuid-goes-here
# Create a bot in Telegram using @BotFather, and generate an API token for it. This is used for 2FA and availability announcements.
TELEGRAM_BOT_USERNAME=YourBotName
TELEGRAM_BOT_KEY=token-goes-here

We've ordered these variables from 'most needed' to 'least needed' for you to develop on the platform. If you set the first one, it will probably start, at least.

Add the following entry to your /etc/hosts file (You can change this, but for the moment it's hard coded for the dev scripts and you may need to change that in a few places):

127.0.0.1	artconomy.vulpinity.com

Once you have your environment file created:

make
make up

This will build the application container and then start the application. You should then be able to visit the local copy at https://artconomy.vulpinity.com/, which will give you a certificate error you can safely ignore. Enjoy your personal copy of Artconomy.com!