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I'm the founder of Gratipay, an open organization with a mission to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We help companies and others pay for open source—and we're funded on our own platform. Offline, I live outside Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and online, I live on Slack, IRC, and GitHub.
Authored Comments
So would you say that democracy is a fundamental characteristic of open organizations? I ask because I believe Jim in his book says something along the lines of "We're not a democracy" as well. Certainly the open source tradition recognizes "benevolent dictatorship" as a valid governance model. Do open organizations inherent that tendency? With Gratipay we've gone around the block several times on this question[1]. We're dialing in on a cooperative structure, which strongly commits us to workplace democracy, though we're also talking about the place of democracy in operations and management. Democracy is slow!
[1] https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/72
Yes, some companies successfully harvest value from the open source ecosystem, add their own value (support, legal assurances, etc.), and sell their value-add at a profit. As Stephen Walli pointed out at #ATO2016, this is not really an "open source business model," it's a proprietary business model that uses open source for raw material.
What if there *were* a truly open source business model? What if we could teach companies how to pay money for open source software *itself*?