TLDR; https://staroid.com gives SaaS delivery capability to open-source community and funds contributors when users use them on the cloud, so the project can be more sustainable.
Open-source and SaaS
Source code and the binary package has been two primary delivery mechanism for Open-source projects. They were probably okay for users 10 years ago, but cloud-based SaaS became the most preferable way to use the software nowadays.
However, open-source communities don’t have the direct capability of doing SaaS, so usually 3rd party companies are providing SaaS for the projects.
Especially, cloud platforms, such as AWS, are in an extremely favorable position for this. They can just plug-in one more open-source project to the platform when it becomes popular. We can see many examples such as ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Apache Spark, etc.
Capturing value
The value created by a software project is usually captured when it is getting delivered. Not when it is being written. (especially the financial value)
Open-source communities don’t deliver SaaS, thus they don’t capture the majority of the value (maybe get some donations), 3rd party companies who do, like AWS, captures the majority of the value (like subscription, usage charge).
Problem
The problem is captured value from those 3rd party companies usually go to their shareholders and employees, not the actual contributors.
You might think contributors can start a company and become a shareholder or an employee themselves. And that’s true and some people do. But still,
- not all contributors become shareholders or employees of a company who captures the value
- you have to spend quite a lot of time to build a SaaS delivery mechanism in your company instead of improving the open-source itself.
Often, those a lot of time spent on SaaS delivery is still not enough to compete with AWS, which already have a massive delivery infrastructure and resources.
staroid.com
https://staroid.com is a cloud platform for open-source projects.
It is designed to give open-source community direct capability of SaaS and contributors to capture the values.
Here’s how it works
- Tell how to build and capture value by creating ‘staroid.yaml’ in the repository.
- Staroid automatically build/release the Github project on the cloud.
- Users launch their favorite open-source projects on the cloud in a few clicks.
- When user launch project, users are being charged based on ‘staroid.yaml’
- Contributors are funded based on value captured from the project.
Therefore open-source communities can provide SaaS without 3rd party company and contributors directly capture the majority value when users use the project.
more details
Check out more details about
- staroid.yaml
- Architecture (it uses Kubernetes as a Runtime)
- StarRank (How it funds contributors)
- Project catalog
What do you think? Let me know your idea around SaaS for open-source and how contributors can capture the value that they created 😀
