Breaking tech monopolies

Moving towards decentralized software development

It’s easy to extract value from your product if 10k people pay 10 USD per month.

It’s really hard to extract value from a product if 1M people would pay 10 cents per month to use it(payment gateway fees, customer attention).

And it’s almost impossible to break into an established supply chain — no matter how superior your solution is.

Innovation is built from a lot of 10 cent ideas. So although your opensource project might be worth more than all the companies that use it combined, you are left with little options for monetization.

Given that email was first built by developers and for developers, and is now ubiquitous — can a new open-source monetization mechanism create the precedent and the blueprint for a better way of working on what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at, AND being rewarded fairly for it?

The proposal

Turn code into electricity. Into a pay-per-use commodity. Connect the money hose directly to creators, bypassing the gatekeepers. Obtain a positive feedback loop by transparently and fairly paying every project contributor.

1. Flatten the hierarchy and extract cognition optimally from all participants. Instead of top-down, go bottom-up; an A.I. recommender system advertises work to be done to the best-fit developers. Developers choose what they work on, based on what they’re good at, what they care about and what gets them paid the most.
2. Reduce friction and let developers associate and create together freely. No contracts, no gate-keeping. If the work is good, it gets remunerated by a smart contract.
3. Defragment organizations. Support means trading 20 hours of work from someone who isn’t an expert in a very specific problem(but knows the domain language of the task) for one hour from an expert.

How to start?

For simplicity, start remunerating open source projects and let authors and maintainers figure out where they allocate part of the funds they receive.

In this new model, all open source project authors are remunerated based on the impact they have on the network of open source projects.

But how do we start injecting capital into this network, so we get the (positive feedback)wheels turning?

Capital injection

OpenSpur will be rolling out the first decentralized managed database cloud solution. There are 900 database systems in existence, each with unique strengths and tradeoffs. The first deployment will contain about 100 database offerings — more than any other centralized counterpart(Heroku has about 25 database offerings in their add-on marketplace).

SingleStore and Aiven are doing this in a traditional, gated system. Can a decentralized network of developers working on a common goal offer a better product?

The prototype

Networks and network effects. Let’s see how to leverage them.

1. Maybe Spring Data doesn’t have bindings for your database tech yet — but directing 5% of your profit to Spring developers will bring it to market. This will increase adoption of your tech and increase the revenue you get. Rinse and repeat with another ORM or community tool.
2. Common hardware infrastructure for all projects. The platform leases and releases cloud machines as demand fluctuates. The project authors are oblivious to this — it’s part of the platform.
3. One transparent, low-fee payment gateway. 95% of the profit goes to the project owners. 3% goes to the rest of the open source community, in orders of magnitude proportional to the contribution(think transitive dependencies and ecosystem projects such as ORMs) to the project bringing in the revenue. The payment token also captures the value of the network .
4. One unified software interface to store metrics, logs and handle user accounts. One UI for all projects.
5. One common marketplace for all cognition. Be it support, architectural consulting or work. All of it with perpetual rewards. As a project owner, you get a cut of everything.

The OpenSpur dashboard

To participate, an open-source database developer simply writes a recipe to deploy the technology, and sets the hourly running price. Integrating with the logging, metrics and support feature(which will be paid) is simply a matter of performing a set of https requests.

This would validate the hypothesis of distributed autonomous organizations. And, in a larger sense, the value and importance of freedom — with a quantifiable, economic bottom line. We believe in “free”(not of charge) and “open” — let’s make it happen!

Closing thoughts

OpenSpur will be coming out of stealth soon — we’re currently onboarding select projects. Enabling developers to associate and create with minimal friction — and being remunerated for it. If you are a project owner and this is a worthy mission for you, and something you want to be a part of, join our community and follow us on Twitter for updates.

Excelsior!