Okay, let’s start with that Open Source is not just license for software with code. It is a community of people with a mindset that sharing benefits us more then keeping things to ourselves. Not many business people understand that. Quite often their potential clients want the solution to be Open Source, and even software company owners get confused, as it happens more and more often, and at some point they realize that there is no way they could vendor lock their clients anymore. So they need to find another way, maybe service/support agreements, which they’ve never done before. I am not the businessman, I only talked to them about that, because they’ve asked me to explain how to make money in this situation. Journalists also asked “Why you don’t want to make money?”. They don’t get what the Open Source community is all about, and that licensing was born as a protection from attacks on the people who like to share things.
So you ask people who are passionate about the world being open, how to make money. And I don’t know. And in Open Source if I don’t know, I look into the code, or try to run things.
The essential part for making money is to be properly registered as a legal entity. If you’re not a legal entity, you will be punished. Maybe for a business it is okay to be punished and learn from mistakes (unless you’re being jailed), but if you’re a coder, then you probably are fixated to do things without mistakes that don’t crash few hours (months) later. So you want to make things right from the start. And if you like Open Source, make sure that everything you do is also based on Open Source and can be validated.
So the legalese requires you to open a company, then set up accounts, get contracts, do the work, send invoices, get money.
Problem No.1: Laws are not Open Source
Business people do not care. If there is money, they hire lawyers, and the lawyers deal with that. Even government officials say it in clear - hire lawyer to you want to understand what legal entities are available and what entity do you need.
When I tried put laws on a public website to mark relevant sections and track changes, I’ve been told by the government officials to it is illegal for me to do so, unless I am a licensed organization to do this. That was a shock. Few years later I learned the lawyers way, so if I put the disclaimer that “this web site is not the accredited source of law information”, I am good. When I asked the officials if that still be punished, they said “no”, but got long faces. I guess they’ve considered it is a loophole and maybe “fixed” that. There are many accredited companies providing these “law databases” to companies for a subscription that is about $100 a year. So they’ve made a market out of rules called laws, that we as citizens pay taxes to maintain. So we pay taxes to maintain the laws, then the government spends this money to buy convenient access to these laws from the commercial vendors. It is as bad as that if you don’t have Open Source culture. Every and each governmental office needs access to this programs, otherwise they are unable to track changes. And small guys like me can not use git to track changes together, because of the market protection.
So I burnt a lot of nerve cells discovering all that stuff. Each taxi driver I talked about this story got outrageous. I asked our journalists to cover this story, so that I can have the official reference for articles on Wikipedia and stuff, but they were not interested. Even politically engaged media found it boring.
So opening a git repository to maintain documentation references for my company to get feedback and improve, failed. The fears and uncertainty of local laws, got me into hospital years before when we tried to legalize outsourcing operations with foreign capital, so instead of pressing on, I gave up. Later, talking with EY representatives about how can they consult companies in this FUD environment, they told - oh, we just call the Ministry to know what they are up to.
At least I got the confirmation, that it is not only me.
So if you want Open Source people to make money, you need to make laws Open Source for them. We are passionate about making the world better, fixing and sharing things, and not in this “us” with “them” games that business and government seems to be playing against each other. Getting caught in the crossfire doesn’t get things even moving on business side.
Problem No.2: Banks are not Open Source
I used to go to a lot of public conferences. Talking to people about these problems. Drawn needed JSON API on tissues for government officials who understood that, and still wanted to do something positive, or maybe planning to transition to IT. Compared to governments, bank are even worse in this “innovation” game. It is more than 20 years now that API is not innovation anymore, and just the way the tech savvy people interact with the world. Getting your statements reports at least in CSV, and not in PDF, and of course not paying you monthly $1 to waste trees to sand the paper copy by snail mail.
Imagine, it is past 2020, and banks still don’t have API for me to access my balances. I had to use apps like GitHub - dukei/any-balance-providers: Collection of AnyBalance providers to parse their web pages, and have to store user/passwords that give access to all buttons and settings on these pages in in 3rd party apps. Or I should download their banking application, which, of course, doesn’t work on Linux phone.
So if you want to run business, you need to resort to classic paper ways, and it is just so much uncomfortable for the most of us. The only way business people get through it, is because they have an insane drive for money, that the rest of us can not replicate. We maybe have an insane drive for open worlds and changing things for the better.
Banks don’t implement solutions themselves. They fail to even maintain open discussion about things they don’t understand. On some hackaton related bank event I delivered a speech about Open APIs. The bank was awesome to hire a professional in public talks, who helped geeks like me to prepare, and we’ve got through several cycles together to ensure that each talk can be understood by a wide variety of people. I explained Open API with an analogy of wall sockets. “When you travel, you may find yourself in a situation when your notebook plug is incompatible with the wall socket. You need power adapter to plug the plug into the different socket. Open API is that adapter to allow my software to work with your bank.” I though that even 5 y/o children got that analogy. And then the main bank guy from the event yelled “I don’t understand”. Now I think he was the smartest. He admitted, because he wanted to change things. Everybody else was just smiling and clapping.
In the end, banks are vendor locked into their software suppliers, and there guys are very protective about their contracts. They will try to do anything bank asks without having a proper expertise and experience. I kind of understand them. I also like money and trying new things. But as a customer I would prefer banks to help guys with a lot of experience of maintaining public API facing services to establish their own companies, and bring a fresh view in Open API with Open Source tools that they already know and help to maintain.
Okay. So, no API → no control over finances → lost time → lost interest → burn out.
Problem No.3: No Open Data
No open source laws - you don’t know how to do things. No open source banking - you don’t know how to monitor and measure things. No data - you don’t know how much you business costs.
Calculating upkeep cost to keep you and you company alive needs data. If you have the data about this costs, you can share it with people to get funded. It is not only about services and products. For the most of us (or maybe it is just me) - Open Source is about experiencing the world as a place where you can contribute and your contribution is valuable. Some hackers invented Open Source Licenses to hack around greedy software companies. Other hackers invented source control systems to make sure the code is shared, programming languages that make libraries audited and connected. I believe there are some hackers in finance who currently hack the Open Source sustainability problem too. We don’t know the scope and the scale, so we don’t know how many people need to be supported, and how much money is needed.
Problem No.4: Business is 1930 Game
I don’t think that business model (the gameplay) of 1930 “growth economics” can fix the problem that people who are passionate about making things right, and solve software problems for good, are not getting any money.
Code is only alive when it is alive in a head maintainers. It takes time for the code to get there, and trying to replace it with all that legal rules and regulations from another word, replacing the drive for perfection with the drive for money, will just get people weird.
If the business gameplay is the user level, then we need to get down to the kernel level to see the hardware signals we are getting, which syscalls are getting triggered, debug conflicts and resolve race conditions. Then maybe we will have other ways than solving the “how to sell products that people get for free”.
Projected financial goals
“People don’t want jobs - they want money that come with jobs” (c) some guy trying to quote some Nobel prize winner who talked about poverty.
Locking $5mln in some 3rd party generator account with 24% performance to have a $10k a month, would keep me happy. And I can deliver a promise that each day I will contribute to one of the Open Source projects I care about, where 50% monthly will be spent publicly for experiments with distribution (generator downstream) and paying people for things I can not do myself.
That will solve the problem for good for one person, and maybe people around will get happier too.
