A useful design can enable hundreds of later objects. We want the earlier work to remain visible as people adapt, manufacture, maintain, and improve it.
The hypothesis
Preserving contribution ancestry may improve attribution and make it easier to support useful upstream work. 0CAD provides a practical environment for testing this through parametric designs and their derivatives.
Start with provenance
A design record could carry its source, version, license, parameter changes, and links to upstream work. Production feedback and maintenance should be visible alongside initial authorship.
An ancestry link does not establish the exact share of a later result caused by an earlier contribution. Nor does it create a financial entitlement by itself.
What could go wrong?
Automatic perpetual rewards can become tolls on reuse. A graph can over-credit the first author, under-credit maintenance, miss independent reinvention, or be manipulated by creating trivial derivatives.
Open access and clear licensing must remain understandable even when recognition or compensation arrangements change.
A useful next test
Take one permitted base model and several useful variants. Ask designers and Makers whether the ancestry helps them understand, reuse, and improve the work compared with a static file and its ordinary license attribution.
Only after provenance is useful should a bounded, opt-in reward experiment be considered, with agreed terms and a way to stop. No operational inheritance or royalty engine is offered today.
Status and revision
This is a concept note, not a reported experiment result. Maintained by the WebTree project team, led by Max Levitskiy. Initial public synthesis: 5 September 2026. Future revisions should state what changed and why.