In the 20 years since its inception, open source has turned out to be the most successful model for building software. The world today runs on open-source software (OSS). An ecosystem has been created around OSS. Businesses and software builders use OSS directly or indirectly, while others offer services and products based on OSS.

OSS is perceived as being free, fair and/or ethical. This perception, however, may not be entirely true. That may be counter-intuitive, but it’s at the heart of the debate around OSS. As OSS is growing up, it’s becoming more successful, more complex, and ubiquitous. It seems we are entering a new phase for OSS, and it’s not without growing pains.

Commercial OSS in the cloud

The four essential freedoms are a cornerstone of OSS. They refer to what users can do with the software, but they tell us nothing about the economic cost, or benefit, related to the software. OSS is free as in speech, but not free as in beer. Someone has to build the software, and then someone has to maintain, run, and manage it.

As far as the perception of OSS being fair or ethical goes: it’s just that – a perception. The perception stems from the OSS community ethos, but in reality, the OSS freedoms are at odds with notions of fair or ethical use. Anyone can contribute as much or as little as they please to OSS. Anyone can use OSS for any purpose, regardless of contribution.

This has led to where we are today. Cloud vendors like AWS, Google or Microsoft, have built their infrastructure based on OSS. Each of them also contributes to OSS in many ways, including code and outreach for existing OSS projects, as well as establishing new OSS projects. But use of, or contribution to, each OSS project is not really accounted for.

Recently, the Apache Software Foundation, one of the key OSS institutions, celebrated its 20th anniversary. The ASF claims the value of the software under its auspices is around $20 Billion, by its own estimates. Everyone is entitled to use the software for free, and many do. But the ones who create this value are the ones who contribute to OSS, be it in code or in other ways.

As analyses have shown, many OSS contributors do this because they are intrinsically motivated: the software is interesting to them, they need it, or they feel good about their contribution. In that respect, they are not much different from vendors that have chosen to build OSS products. Those vendors have invested in their OSS, and their ROI depends on it.

Which brings us to cloud vendors. As many pundits note, cloud vendors operate on a whole different plane. If commercial OSS vendors are about taking innovation from 0 to 1, cloud vendors are about taking it from 1 to n. This brings value in and by itself. Cloud vendors also release OSS projects of their own, and contribute to existing ones. Their strategies, however, differ, and this is where things get complicated.

AWS is the leader in the cloud market. The strategy AWS has adopted with regards to OSS, however, has exposed it to criticism. Recently, an independent data-driven analysis was done on GitHub, where OSS code lives. The analysis showed that in terms of code, AWS does not seem to be contributing much to the development of the OSS products it offers as a service.

It’s understandable why vendors building those products are looking to tweak their licenses to disallow AWS from running their software as a service. It’s also understandable why the OSI, which has control over OSS licenses, is pushing back: by introducing those tweaks, the software is no longer OSS.

If this was just a clash of commercial interests, we might be getting our pop corn to watch. But for something with such high value to society at large as OSS, the ramifications are important. Is there a way everyone involved can get a fair share of the profit, and keep contributing to OSS? Let’s hear what 2 CEOs from vendors who build OSS, and work with AWS, have to say.

The co-opetition view: one big act vs. many small ones

Dor Laor is the founder and CEO of ScyllaDB, an OSS vendor with an interesting story. ScyllaDB was built on a contentious premise, as it is a re-implementation of another OSS database: Apache Cassandra. Laor has shared thoughts on OSS license changes, as well as Amazon’s latest move to offer Cassandra as a managed service on AWS cloud.

Our discussion started touching upon ScyllaDB’s latest features. According to Laor, these features (most prominently lightweight transactions) do not just bring parity with Cassandra, but go one step further. Laor expanded on the technical aspects of ScyllaDB’s solution. As these seemed technically sound, yet conceptually simple, the discussion moved to a broader topic.

Laor claimed none of ScyllaDB’s closest matches, namely Apache Cassandra and AWS DynamoDB, have such features. When asked why he thinks that is, given the nature of those features, Laor offered 2 answers.

For Cassandra, he mentioned that for the last few years its former main contributor, namely DataStax, has taken a step back. Naturally, this has stalled Cassandra’s development considerably. As for AWS, Laor noted that AWS has the tendency to offer products that are good enough, but not necessarily the best in their league.

As ScyllaDB is also available on AWS, and Laor was present at AWS’s main event, re:Invent, in 2019, he offered a metaphor to explain this. Laor said there were a number of stages set up for various acts in the re:Invent after party, and he found all of them mediocre. Laor went on to add that he sees that as a metaphor for AWS’ philosophy of going wide, rather than deep in its undertakings. This is a point shared in other OSS vendor strategies, too.

But ScyllaDB went beyond that, to do something no other OSS vendor we know of has done before: offer a compatibility layer for one of AWS’ products, namely DynamoDB. ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB API support will be officially available soon, and it will enable DynamoDB users to migrate to ScyllaDB. Laor said there is a waiting list for this.

This is technically feasible, and legally permissible. Unless things change, there are no restrictions on using APIs, as per the famous Oracle vs. Google case verdict. While some of AWS’ own people questioned this move, Laor claimed users are better off using ScyllaDB. In turn, this opens up some interesting questions. What about ethics, and contribution?

Building a new implementation of an existing API seems cleaner than using someone else’s implementation, but it still means benefiting from a userbase others built. Laor acknowledged that, as well as the fact that ScyllaDB leverages contributions from Amazon, Cassandra, and DataStax. He also pointed out that this spurs innovation and benefits users, and measuring contribution is very hard.

ScyllaDB has an open core strategy. Some features are proprietary, while the OSS core is licensed under AGPL, which Laor said AWS avoids. So far this has worked in deterring AWS from offering ScyllaDB as a service, although it could also be that ScyllaDB has not reached critical mass yet. In any case, as Laor said, these things change.

The collaboration view: balancing OSS makers and takers

Most OSS products fall under one of two categories. Many products are largely driven by a single vendor, whose employees contribute most of the related effort and drive its directions. Other products leverage contributions that cross-cut organizations who employ the contributors; often, OSS work is the main activity for such contributors.

But there is an OSS product in which the vendor commercializing it only contributes 5% of its code while still being the largest contributor. The product is commercially successful, has a community-driven decision making process, and is a distinguished AWS partner, too. And these are not the only reasons why Acquia, the vendor commercializing the Drupal CMS, and Dries Buytaert, its founder, stand out.

Recently, Buytaert shared his thoughts on balancing OSS makers and takers in an elaborate blog post. In our discussion, Buytaert confessed it took him a couple of weeks to put his post together. This is understandable, considering how many aspects of OSS it touches upon.

Drupal started in 2000, while Acquia was founded in 2007. As Buytaert highlighted, Acquia and the Drupal community have a unique relationship, which is formally documented in a charter. The community includes about 80.000 contributors, while Aquia employs about 1.000 people.

Yet, Drupal’s governance is not with Acquia. The community sets Drupal’s roadmap, and elects people in leadership roles. People choose to contribute to areas that matter most to them, and Acquia does this, too. Buytaert said that even when there is a decision Acquia does not agree with, the decision is carried through, if there is substantial backing for it.

Buytaert builds on the notion of OSS as part of the Commons, introducing an important distinction. For end users, OSS projects are public goods; the shared resource is the software. But for OSS companies, OSS projects are common goods; the shared resource is the (potential) customer. Makers invest heavily in the software, takers are mostly interested in customers.

Buytaert, leveraging Elinor Ostrom’s work in addition to his own experience, seems to have gotten to the heart of the issue. Research shows that when the Commons are left unchecked, without governance or rules for contribution, they collapse: shared resources are either engulfed or exhausted.

Organizations like the ASF and the OSI have done a good job in making OSS successful. But now that OSS is successful, without a mechanism for fair reward in place, we have no reason to believe OSS will not have the fate of Commons that preceded it. This is why we wondered whether the OSI should perhaps reconsider. Apparently, we are not the only ones, and the OSI seems to be listening.

Ethical software

First off, there seems to be an ongoing debate within the OSI itself as to what should constitute an OSS license today. This goes to show that what worked 20 years ago is not necessarily what works today. In addition, more and more people seem to be realizing the OSS conundrum, and are sharing ideas to move forward. Buytaert, on his part, offers 3 concrete proposals.

One, don’t just appeal to organizations’ self-interest, but also to their fairness principles. Two, encourage end users to offer selective benefits to Makers. Three, experiment with new licenses. Those points were also backed by Laor, who prompted users to consciously vet their OSS providers for fairness, and pointed to precedents like the Open Invention Network.

One thing is clear: AWS should not be excluded, it’s a vital part of the OSS ecosystem. The fact that this is a complex ecosystem with many actors that need to strike a balance is something many people agree on. This includes Buytaert, Laor, and AWS VP/Distinguished Engineer Matthew Wilson, a self-proclaimed “OSS romantic”, to name but a few.

Buytaert also agreed with Laor that while AWS is a good partner to have, if it decided to start offering ScyllaDB or Drupal as a managed service on its own, there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Buytaert was also clear on something else: making OSS sustainable may require a break with OSS as we know it. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

This also seems to be the gist of Wilson’s position as stated in a number of Twitter threads: this is how OSS works. If you are not happy with it, do it differently – just don’t call it OSS. This is a fair point, made by others, too. Recently Stephen Walli, principal program manager on the Azure engineering team at Microsoft and an OSS veteran, shared his ideas on Software Freedom in a Post Open Source World.

Walli went through the history of OSS, the four essential freedoms, and the ways and reasons people challenge how OSS works. Walli’s message is along similar lines: “I am happy for people to challenge the ideas that define our software collaborations and culture of outbound sharing. But I want them to be bold. If you want to define a new movement then do so.”

Some people call it Commercial OSS, others Cloud Native OSS. Either way, it’s not just commercial interests that question how OSS works today. It’s also people concerned about the ethical implications of OSS. Although it could be argued that fairness touches upon ethics too, Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Ethical Source Movement (ESM) have a somewhat different angle.

Ehmke, who founded the ESM, is a software engineer, a public speaker, and has been an active OSS participant since the early 2000s. Ehmke, who previously stated that “OSI and FSF are not the real arbiters of what is Open Source and what is Free Software” is now running for the board of directors of the OSI, and the OSI’s VP seems open to engaging with her. The ESM states:

“Today, the same OSS that enriches the commons and powers innovation also plays a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racist policing, the deployment of cruel and inhumane weapons, and other human rights abuses all over the world.

We want to do something about this misuse of our software. But as developers we don’t seem to have any recourse, no way to prevent our work from being used to harm others. We want to change that”.

Fair software

The definition of Ethical Software breaks with the four essential freedoms of OSS, creating licenses such as the Hippocratic or the Atmosphere Licenses. This raises questions, including how to enforce such licenses. Though a definite answer is not readily available, for the time being the thinking seems to be that fear of exposure of illegal use should work on a first level. People seem sympathetic to the notion.

Ethical software licenses are not the only OSS variant around, however. There is also the Fair Source License, allowing users to view, download, execute, and modify code free of charge. Up to a certain number of users from an organization can use the code for free, too. After an organization hits that user limit, it will start paying a licensing fee determined by the software publisher.

Fair Source was created by Sourcegraph and drafted by Heather Meeker, a prominent OSS lawyer who also drafted the Commons Clause for RedisLabs. Fair Source got featured on Wired, and received praise from GitLab, but it does not look like it got much traction. The reason is probably that as things stand, Fair Source is also not an OSS compatible license.

This all seems to be pointing somewhere: perhaps we’ve reached the limits of what OSS in its current form can do. People are realizing it, and questioning the status quo. Whether that will lead somewhere, remains to be seen. But some first steps are taken, and the potential seems to be there. OSS was a bold step in its time, too, and its pioneers paved the way.

To wrap up, let us revisit the “quantifying OSS contribution is hard, and it’s not only about code” argument. This is true beyond the shadow of a doubt. But before dismissing quantification as mission impossible, we should consider a few things.

Commercial OSS vendors are building platforms to power today’s data-driven economy. As a 3rd party analysis on GitHub data shows, they -expectedly- seem to be key contributors to their own codebases. While there may be communities of practice built around the products, in most cases we would assume vendors do much of the non-code work too – promotion, support etc.

OSS vendors have people who contribute to these tasks in their payrolls. Presumably, these people leave the digital footprint of their work on all sorts of systems. From OSS code repositories to issue trackers, HR, project management tools and spreadsheets, to social media. Nobody should be more motivated or better positioned to develop a holistic, data-driven model for OSS contribution, than commercial OSS vendors.

Doing this would make their claims much more grounded. To be entirely fair, commercial OSS vendors should also apply this to external contributions, be it from individuals or from organizations such as cloud vendors. And to back claims about putting OSS sustainability and the common good first, changing their status to B Corporation to reflect that might help, too.

To get over the OSS midlife crisis, and make software great again, leadership is paramount. There is no doubt the amount of legal, social, software, and data engineering needed to evolve OSS is staggering. But OSS is so important, that it would be irresponsible to shy away from it. Some OSS leaders are showing the way. Opinions may vary, but the issue is being acknowledged. Who would not want to have ethical, fair, open-source software available on demand in the cloud?

This is a chance for everyone to put their data to good use. Amazon, as well as commercial OSS vendors, are leaders, each in their own way. They have great power, which comes with great responsibility. The way other cloud vendors deal with OSS vendors may not be perfect, but it’s a start. We’d like to see that taken to the next level, and involving the entire industry.

Coming up with a way to fix commercial OSS by measuring and rewarding contribution is something that will not just benefit vendors, but the world at large. So if not them, who? If not now, when?

Originally published on Linked Data Orchestration under CC BY-SA 4.0

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Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

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How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

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Written Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Linux and Open Source, originally posted on ZDNet on August 28, 2018

Most people wouldn’t know an open-source license from their driver’s license. For those who work with open-source software, it’s a different story. Open-source license fights can be vicious, cost serious coin, and determine the fate of multi-million dollar companies. So, when Redis Labs added a new license clause, Commons Clause, on top of Redis, an open-source, BSD licensed, in-memory data structure store, all hell broke loose.

Why? First, you need to understand that while you may never have heard of Redis, it’s a big deal. It enables real-time applications such as advertising, gaming financial services, and IoT to work at speed. That’s because it can deliver sub-millisecond response times to millions of requests per second.

But Redis Labs has been unsuccessful in monetizing Redis, or at least not as successful as they’d like. Their executives were discovering, like the far more well-known Docker, that having a great open-source technology did not mean you’d be making millions. Redis’ solution was to embrace Commons Clause.

This license forbids you from selling the software. It also states you may not host or offer consulting or support services as “a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software”.

If that doesn’t sound like open-source software to you, you have lots of company.

Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), snapped on Twitter: “Redis just went proprietary, which sucks. No, this is not just ‘a limitation concerning fair use,’ it is an abrogation of software freedom.”

In an email, Phipps added, “Adding a significant clause to an existing license that has been approved by OSI instantly renders it non-approved, and the text of the so-called ‘Commons Clause,’ which actually fences off the commons, is clearly intended to violate clause 1 of the Open Source Definition and probably also violates clauses 3, 5 and 6. As such adding this clause to a license would be a major abrogation of software freedom removing essential rights from any affected open-source community.”

Software programmer Drew DeVault made his stance clear from his opening words: “Commons Clause will destroy open source.” Commons Clause, he continued, “presents one of the greatest existential threats to open source I’ve ever seen. It preys on a vulnerability open-source maintainers all suffer from, and one I can strongly relate to. It sucks to not be able to make money from your open-source work. It really sucks when companies are using your work to make money for themselves. If a solution presents itself, it’s tempting to jump at it. But the Commons Clause doesn’t present a solution for supporting open-source software. It presents a framework for turning open-source software into proprietary software.”

Bradley M Kuhn, president of the Software Freedom Conservancy and author of the Affero General Public License, blogged, “This proprietary software license, which is not open source and does not respect the four freedoms of free software, seeks to hide a power imbalance ironically behind the guise ‘open source sustainability.’ Their argument, once you look past their assertion that the only way to save open source is to not do open source, is quite plain: If we can’t make money as quickly and as easily as we’d like with this software, then we have to make sure no one else can as well.”

Andrew ‘Andy’ Updegrove, a founding partner of Gesmer Updegrove, a top technology law firm, and open-source legal expert, found it no surprise that many open-source supporters hate Commons Clause. He rejects the conspiracy theory, “that the Commons Clause will be some sort of virus that will deprive innocent developers of the ability to make a living, and will persuade businesses owners to avoid buying or using code that has any commons clause in it.”

Updegrove believes this is because Heather Meeker, a partner at O’Melveny law firm who drafted it, “is a respected attorney and long-term participant in open-source legal circles, so IMHO the conspiracy theory can be ignored. Note also that Kevin Wang [founder of FOSSA]and Heather have both offered the clause as text to initiate a discussion, and not something to be wholesale adopted as it stands.”

That didn’t stop Redis Labs, which is applying Commons Clause on top of the Apache license, to cover five new Redis modules. Redis is doing this, said its co-founder and CTO Yiftach Shoolman in an email, “for two reasons — to limit the monetization of these advanced capabilities by cloud service providers like AWS and to help enterprise developers whose companies do not work with AGPL licenses.”

On the Redis Labs site, the company now explains in more detail that cloud providers are taking advantage of open-source companies by repackaging their programs into competitive, proprietary-service offerings. These providers contribute very little — if anything — back to those open-source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from them.

Redis Labs contends that “most cloud providers offer Redis as a managed service over their infrastructure and enjoy huge income from software that was not developed by them. Redis Labs is leading and financing the development of open source Redis and deserves to enjoy the fruits of these efforts.” Shoolman insisted that “Redis is open source and will remain under a BSD license.”

Salvatore Sanfilippo, Redis’ creator, added the change just “means that basically certain enterprise add-ons, instead of being completely closed source as they could be, will be available with a more permissive license,” Commons Clauses with Apache.

Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler isn’t so sure. Sandler emailed that Commons Clause “highlights the fundamental problems connected to the wide adoption of non-copyleft licenses, but I think it doesn’t really solve the problem that it seeks to solve. What we really need is strong copyleft licenses where the copyrights are held diversely by individuals and functional charities to make sure that software remains free and that societally we have the rights we need to have confidence in our software in the long run.”

In an email, Wang defended Commons Clause as “mostly used to temporarily transition enterprise offering counterparts of open-source software projects to source-available”. Wang continued: “Open-source software projects are mainly funded by a proprietary offering/service counterparts. Anything to help this layer monetize is good — the fate of the OSS is directly funded by it.

“The world has changed a lot and the open-source software/cloud ecosystem has a lot too,” Wang added. “The Open Source Definition is an immensely [valuable] set of ideals, but maybe it’s outdated to the modern state of the world. … Licensing follows intent, and I certainly don’t think the clause inspires people to close their source. But sometimes people need to change their license.”

Be that as it may, Updegrove wrote Commons Clause is “simple in concept: basically, it gives a developer the right to make sure no one can make money out of her code — whether by selling, hosting, or supporting it — unless the Commons Clause code is a minor part of a larger software product”.

“In one way, that’s in the spirit of a copyleft license (i.e., a prohibition on commercial interests taking advantage of a programmer’s willingness to make her code available for free), but it also violates the ‘Four Freedoms’ of free and open-source software as well as the Open Source Definition by placing restrictions on reuse, among other issues.”

But, “adding the Commons Clause to an open-source license makes it no longer an open-source license,” Updegrove added. And, were the Commons Clause to catch on, “it could give rise to an unwelcome trend”.

“The wide proliferation of licenses in the early days of open source was unhelpful and a cause of ongoing confusion and complexity, since not all licenses were compatible with other licenses. That means that before any piece of open-source code can be added to a code base, it’s necessary to determine whether its license is compatible with the licenses of all other software in the same product. That’s a big and ongoing headache.”

That’s a big reason, Updegrove wrote, why “Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond created the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative so that there would be a central reference point and authority to determine what was and was not an ‘Open Source License’. That definition and process has held now for 20 years — an eternity, in open-source history.”

Therefore, Updegrove sees Commons Clause as a step backward from a process point of view. Worse, “it would be a very disturbing development if the release of the Commons Clause inspired more people to come up with their own license ‘extensions’, especially if they are also not compliant with the Open Software Definition and the Four Freedoms.”

The result? Companies and programmers veering away from using any Commons Clause licensed software. That was not its creators’ intent, but it’s a realistic concern.

Updegrove adds, “Speaking as a lawyer, the fact that someone can still charge for a product that includes Commons Clause software so long as the value does not ‘derive[s], entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the software’ is certain to invite disputes. The most obvious is what does ‘substantially’ [mean]? There is no bright-line for guidance.”

Georg Greve, co-founder and president at Vereign, a blockchain-secured communication company and founder of Free Software Foundation Europe, also worried, “Overall it seems purposefully vague & misleading, probably overreaching and terribly one-sided to establish Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt for any professional use of software licensed under it while making it terribly easy to ‘accidentally’ incorporate such components.”

Still, Updegrove thinks Commons Clause may be “a useful addition to the licensing menu, but not one that will be appropriate for use in all situations. … Developers should be clear in advance what their goals are when they’re put their fingers to their keys. Commons Clause-licensed software is not likely to get the same amount of reuse as might otherwise be the case.”

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But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

The post Just another Cyber Monday: Amazing Amazon and the best deal ever appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the meantime, the token economy has exploded, and despite its many faults and weaknesses, it has brought open and contributive accounting to the mainstream as a practice, via programmable tokens that are divided up exactly as the open source communities decide. We have moved from an economy based on capitalist enterprises, which extracted all the surplus value from the developers, to an eco-system in which contributory competency networks, prepare white papers, crowdfund through tokens, and distribute the value much more widely amongst the contributors.

While much remains to be done, this is a major milestone in showing a possible future of or work and reward systems. The two following extracts bring testimonies about how the ‘developer working class’ is looking at these advances.

The question now is, can other sections of workers, those that do not belong to the aristocracy of labor that do software work, also learn and benefit from these new systems, and a second question is, We will be working on these very questions this summer and publish a report about it.

(excerpted from): How App Tokens Changed the Life of the Developer Working Class

Richard Burton: A month of work for the protocol (Ethereum) has completely changed my life. I am free to travel the world and work on whatever I want. It is hard to overstate the mental freedom afforded by having a cash buffer and not having to work all the time to make ends meet. It has had a profound effect on my mental health and freed me up to do the best work of my life. The people who built this protocol took a chance on me and I am incredibly grateful.

Vitalik and his team gave birth to a protocol that over 7,000 people committed to. They effectively held an IPO for their protocol at the start of the project. Since then, thousands more have got involved by trading Ether, writing code, and helping the protocol to flourish.

– “Bitcoin is not just a protocol or money, it’s a new business model for Open Source Software. Prior to Bitcoin, you had to raise money, write software, distribute your product, build a business model, and work towards liquidity. Angels, VCs, salespeople and bankers guided you the entire way, through a maze of tolls and controls.”

Naval Ravikant saw this coming months before the Ether sale. The coins that protocols distribute to contributors are like shares in a company. The key difference is that these shares are not locked up by startup founders and venture capitalists.

There are a thousand nightmarish stories about startup employees not being able to afford to exercise their stock options and missing out on millions of dollars. Alex MacCaw and I wrote about this problem in 2013 after seeing many of our friends go through the stressful process of trying to borrow money to buy the stock they had earnt.

The current stock option system is totally broken. It forces people to stay at companies longer than they want to in the hope that a liquidity event is just around the corner.

App Coins are totally different from stock options. I was paid for my month’s work and I was rewarded for my belief in the protocol at an early stage. There was no cliff, no vesting schedule, no liquidation preferences, no VC ratchets, no exercise window, just coins. I helped the Ethereum team when they had no money and they rewarded me for that.

The moment I decided to move on to a freelance job, I was free to do so. I didn’t have to stick around in the hope that I would make some huge pile of money in the future.

This model is going to completely change the war for talent. If you’re a smart engineer, you can go and join a rocketship startup and work crazy hours. Alternatively, you can head over to Thailand, live cheaply, and work for App Coins.

Protocol creators need your help: They need people to write clear documentation, teachers to help people learn, designers to work on the user interfaces, customer support staff to handle the swelling inboxes, investors to raise capital, and a whole range of other talent to help them build a successful protocol. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write code—you can still contribute.

Protocols will follow the startup power law: millions will be started and only a few hundred will change the world forever.

In the future, billions of people will be working for a protocol. They will define themselves by the protocols they work for and how much they can contribute.

Protocolism might be the solution we need. It harnesses human ingenuity and distributes the benefits far and wide. It can help us build an economy for the 99%.

When a startup succeeds, a handful of people get insanely wealthy. When a protocol succeeds, thousands of people profit. In the future, the great protocols could lift millions of people out of poverty.

(excerpted from): Decentralization as a Means for Developers and other Stakeholders to Take Back Control from Centralized Platforms

Chris Dixon: Let’s look at the problems with centralized platforms. Centralized platforms follow a predictable life cycle. When they start out, they do everything they can to recruit users and 3rd-party complements like developers, businesses, and media organizations. They do this to make their services more valuable, as platforms (by definition) are systems with multi-sided network effects. As platforms move up the adoption S-curve, their power over users and 3rd parties steadily grows.

When they hit the top of the S-curve, their relationships with network participants change from positive-sum to zero-sum. The easiest way to continue growing lies in extracting data from users and competing with complements over audiences and profits. Historical examples of this are Microsoft vs Netscape, Google vs Yelp, Facebook vs Zynga, and Twitter vs its 3rd-party clients. Operating systems like iOS and Android have behaved better, although still take a healthy 30% tax, reject apps for seemingly arbitrary reasons, and subsume the functionality of 3rd-party apps at will.

For 3rd parties, this transition from cooperation to competition feels like a bait-and-switch. Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. We now have decades of evidence that doing so will end in disappointment. In addition, users give up privacy, control of their data, and become vulnerable to security breaches. These problems with centralized platforms will likely become even more pronounced in the future.

Cryptonetworks are networks built on top of the internet that 1) use consensus mechanisms such as blockchains to maintain and update state, 2) use cryptocurrencies (coins/tokens) to incentivize consensus participants (miners/validators) and other network participants. Some cryptonetworks, such as Ethereum, are general programming platforms that can be used for almost any purpose. Other cryptonetworks are special purpose, for example Bitcoin is intended primarily for storing value, Golem for performing computations, and Filecoin for decentralized file storage.

Early internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or non-profit organizations that relied on the alignment of interests in the internet community to gain adoption. This method worked well during the very early stages of the internet but since the early 1990s very few new protocols have gained widespread adoption. Cryptonetworks fix these problems by providing economics incentives to developers, maintainers, and other network participants in the form of tokens. They are also much more technically robust. For example, they are able to keep state and do arbitrary transformations on that state, something past protocols could never do.

Cryptonetworks use multiple mechanisms to ensure that they stay neutral as they grow, preventing the bait-and-switch of centralized platforms. First, the contract between cryptonetworks and their participants is enforced in open source code. Second, they are kept in check through mechanisms for “voice” and “exit.” Participants are given voice through community governance, both “on chain” (via the protocol) and “off chain” (via the social structures around the protocol). Participants can exit either by leaving the network and selling their coins, or in the extreme case by forking the protocol.

In short, cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token. This alignment is one of the main reasons Bitcoin continues to defy skeptics and flourish, even while new cryptonetworks like Ethereum have grown alongside it.

Photo by Marco Verch

The post Tokens as a Labor Model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by torbakhopper

The post Holochain – The commons engine for cooperation at scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

Holochain is a new technology project with huge potential for the cooperative economy.

Members of The Open Co-op have been promoting the idea that new software could, potentially, revolutionise both our failing democracies and our predatory capitalist economies, since 2004. Back then we weren’t quite so clear on exactly how the required information architecture should be designed – but we knew what we wanted it to do and how it should work. In 2004, I published a paper entitled Participatory Democracy Networks, which explained how I thought some new information architecture could facilitate participatory democracy worldwide.

The above diagram illustrates the undemocratic nature of the current system and the required power relationships of a truly democratic system. The extent to which any ‘player’ controls any other is represented by the extent to which its colour encapsulates any other. For example, in the current situation individuals influence business to some extent (by buying things) and the government to some extent (by voting) but do not control them, individuals only control the NGOs.

Not long after that we founded The Open Co-op and designed some screenshots of our “dream communication system” which we called PlaNet, to illustrate how the new software we wanted might work, and developed a presentation using some fictional cartoon characters to illustrate how a system like PlaNet could help people live together in a collaborative sustainable economy.

In 2017 we updated the PLANET screenshots – presenting the idea as An open source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy incorporating a range of interlinked apps on a smart phone. PLANET is still not a software project, it remains a vision which aims to illustrate some of the concepts and advantages of a collaborative, user owned and managed economic platform.

The purpose of the PLANET concept is to illustrate, through a Graphical User Interface, what it might be like to interact with a new economic system which has been built collaboratively as an open source project. PLANET would be owned and controlled by its members, giving them complete control over how it is run via proposals, and votes on other members’ proposals. PLANET incorporates concepts such as: Agent-centric architecture, Personal data licenses, Portable reputation, Alternative currencies, Group management, Local relevance and Delegative voting – all the same ideas we were proposing in 2004 to help build participatory democracy networks.

So, for 12 years PLANET has remained a dream. And then we discovered Holochain.

Whilst everyone has been getting very excited about the potential of blockchain we have remained skeptical for a variety of reasons;

1. You cannot store all the data in the world in a blockchain
2. The blockchain is a spectacular waste of energy that could instead be used to improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world – just see the insane energy consumption of Bitcoin. If growth continues at the present pace, researchers estimate that Bitcoin mining alone would consume more power in 2020 than the entire world does today.
3. A system that is designed to enable total anonymity is actually not very appropriate for building collaborative, trust-based systems and organisations.

Sometimes technology gets over-hyped and there’s a growing body of evidence explaining why you don’t need to use blockchain. This paper by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais from the Department of Computer Science in Zurich, gives a good outline of whether a blockchain is the appropriate technical solution to solve a problem.

Whilst blockchain has and is being used on some great projects, this amazing story from inside a Jordanian refugee camp that runs on blockchain to help Syrian refugees regain legal identities that were lost when they fled their homes, is the perfect example of how the technology is failing to deliver. To quote the conclusions “the transactions were slow and the fees were too high” … ” so “Instead of cutting the banks out of the equation, [the World Food Programme] has essentially become one”. Haddad, who runs the programme acknowledges that—“Of course we could do all of what we’re doing today without using blockchain…”. But, he adds, “my personal view is that the eventual end goal is digital ID, and beneficiaries must own and control their data.”

Owning and controlling your own data. That’s what we want. That’s the fundamental idea behind PLANET.

But trying to force a system like blockchain, which was designed to enable anonymous transactions, to help you own and control your own data is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Wouldn’t it be better to start with a system which is specifically designed to enable you to own and control you own data? That also, by design, encourages trust between peers and, as well as that, enables giant volumes of transactions at low transaction costs?

That’s what Holochain does. And it does it very well.

Whilst some people have been embarrassing humanity by creating mind-numbing concepts such as Crypto-kitties and trying to force tomatoes on a blockchain, the team at Holo have been figuring out the fundamental information architecture for a new, sustainable, collaborative and cooperative economy. Such a valiant and laudable mission is clearly not for the faint-hearted and the Holo team brings together brains such as Eric Harris-Braun, Arthur Brock, Jean Russell, Jean-François Noubel, and Matthew Schutte to name just a few. They are an incredible group of system-thinkers whose ideas have evolved out of the metacurrency project and CEPTR and synergised as Holochain, a new applications framework that they are giving away to the world for free.  To help subsidize that effort, they are also launching the first flagship application built using Holochain, a peer-to-peer web hosting platform, confusingly named Holo host, for which they recently raised over $20 million through a crowdfunding campaign and an Initial Community Offering.

In order to explain what Holochain is, how it works and why co-operators everywhere should take note, we interviewed Matthew Schutte, their Director of Communications.

OSB: What is Holo in layman’s terms?

MS: Holo is a peer to peer app hosting marketplace. Today app hosting is the domain of big business. If a developer builds an app, they serve it via a hosting company like Amazon or Google and pay to use their big data warehouses – huge sever farms which present the app to end users. Holo makes it possible for normal folks to make use of the idle storage and processing capacity on their computers to get into that business… For example, when I’m writing an email, my machine is doing some work but it has the capacity to do 1000 times more work – so HOLO enables you to rent some of that extra capacity.

OSB: OK, that sounds great, but I can imagine people worrying it might slow down their computers. Is that something users will need to think about?

MS: You can set your own parameters. You can specify the settings for how much of your machine you allocate to Holo – Our goal is to prioritise your use over Holo’s use (although this may not be included in the initial version at launch) so you never get slowed down. Some people will be dedicating whole machines to Holo hosting… but if you’re using Holo on your main computer you don’t want it to be annoying… you just want it to make use of the spare capacity. If it’s reducing your quality of life – that’s not a cost most people are going to be willing to pay.

OSB: Will it be secure? I can imagine people worrying that if a Holo service or app is running in the background on their computer then maybe it can access parts of their machine that they don’t want people to see.

MS: Yes, it’s secure. It only has the ability to interact with certain parts of your computer. This is similar to the way in which a web site can change pixels on your screen but can’t read your private files. Technically it’s called “sandboxing”. Holo will use a cordoned off section of your computer. We’re not inventing new stuff there, the technology to do this securely has existed for a long time.

OSB: Will people need a special computer, or a certain specification of computer to run Holo?

MS: No. Any Mac or PC, desktop or laptop will work but mobile devices are slower and so not so suitable for serving websites to others.

OSB: Why would someone want to host HOLO apps on their computer? How is that going to help build a collaborative, sustainable economy?

MS: It’s kind of like the way AirBnb and Uber work. Their model enables them to make use of spare bedrooms – to help people pay off their mortgages. Holo makes use of the spare space and processing power of your computer to help you pay for your internet connection and maybe even the cost of the computer itself…

There is a massive amount of unused computing power in the world, more than any one company controls… Amazon is king of hosting at the moment, though there are others that are neck and neck, like IBM and Google.

Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet and their web hosting division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes up 10% of Amazon’s revenues but more profit than the entire rest of the company combined. App hosting is the cash cow of the third most most valuable company on the planet!

Holo is aiming to do to Amazon’s cash cow what Uber did to Taxis – but instead of taking 20 or 30% of the money from the drivers (like Uber does) with Holo 99% of the revenues go straight to the host who’s computer is doing the work.  Holo takes a 1% or less transaction fee.

OSB: I see, so Holo has the potential to disrupt the hosting industry and divert money back to the people who join the network and host apps on their computers. But, if you’ve invented a way to do that why wouldn’t you take more than 1%?

MS: We don’t need it – because we’re distributing everything… just like Airbnb was able to grow from two guys with air mattresses to a company that books more rooms than any other… because they didn’t have to build and own locations – we’re catalysing existing assets instead. We’ve invented a really efficient accounting system – and a 1% transaction fee is our business model for Holo. And that helps subsidize the larger Holochain ecosystem. This is just a first step in a larger plan to shift how humanity communicates.

OSB: OK, I thought so – there’s clearly more lurking under the hood! But before we dive into that I want to take a step back and try and get a real understanding of what Holochain is and how this idea works. You’ve told us a bit about Holo, which is a Holochain app.  Can you explain the technology behind Holochain itself a bit more?

MS: Sure. Peer to peer app hosting is not a new idea. Just like BitTorrent offers peer to peer file sharing, Holochain makes use of some of the same technology.

A few decades ago people realized that it would be useful to be able to store a file on a network of computers, but not have to depend on having any single computer be up and running at a particular time in order to access them.  Note that with the web, when you look up a website, you are looking up content based on which machine it is stored on. That means that if that machine goes down, you can’t access that content. That kind of sucks. It’s also a major reason why most people don’t host their own websites anymore.  If for any reason your computer goes down, no one can reach your website. This “server maintainer as second job” thing was a pain in the neck, so most folks opted to pay others to “do that hosting work.”

With BitTorrent, it’s different. When you reach out for a file, you don’t ask for a specific machine. You ask for the file. Other machines on the network share information about which files are stored where. Within a split second, you’ve got your file (or at least have started to download it). This even works if every computer that originally received the file has since gone offline.  That’s because if a computer notices that one of its neighbors has gone offline, it starts making backups by recruiting new machines to hold onto a copy of that file.

For example, if I send a tweet – it might get stored by 200 different computers. If one drops offline, the system looks for others to make backup copies to ensure 200 copies remain online – these nodes are “gossiping” with each other – if they don’t hear back when they check in with the ‘Oli node’, they say “oh no, we lost him!” and then look for the next nearest node (what “nearness” means is a bit too technical for this interview). Jimmy is the nearest – so they get Jimmy’s node to make a copy to ensure 200 copies stay online. It’s like a self healing network.

That’s great for file storage – but not to run apps, you can’t run Airbnb like that. You can’t run Uber like that.  Apps need to build sets of relationships and transform resources. Holochain takes the file sharing concept and adds more functionality. Borrowing from three different technologies in the process:

1. From BitTorrent – self healing storage, the Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
2. From Blockchain and other things – the concept of an immutable, unchangeable, tamper proof data log. A hash chain.
3. From Git, the most widely used system for collaborative software – the Agent centric model, where there is no one global truth.

In the Git world, I have my version of the code. If I make a copy and add a green button, altering the code, I can suggest the change to you. If you like the change and accept it, you sign it with a cryptographic key, just like track changes in a Word doc. When you suggest changes it shows them to me. If I accept this change, and I sign that acceptance with my cryptographic key, it updates my chain to include the changes I accept. But you can’t change my stuff. I have to update my stuff. As a sovereign agent.

Holochain is an agent centric model which is very different to the data centric model of blockchain. There are no miners, and no company in the middle deciding and enforcing the rules.  Instead, the participants of a particlar of the network running it as a community. By pooling together our computing resources we make possible an entire network of distributed apps that are free from centralised, corporate control. By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

OSB: That’s awesome, it sounds like you’ve developed a system to run something like PLANET, the open source OS we’ve been thinking about for so long. But if this is going to work the peer to peer network will need to grow pretty quickly, is that where the HoloPorts come in?

Aside:

As well as running possibly the world’s first ever ethically (rather than purely finically) motivated ICO, which raised £20 million, the Holo team also recently closed a crowdfunder for Holo ports, which raised over $1 million. The supply of ‘Holo Tokens’ which were sold in the ICO was calculated by a fixed formula based on data from the crowdfunding campaign for HoloPorts. HoloPorts are “plug and play” devices which come with software already installed and are optimized to run Holo. When they arrive with the 2114 users who purchased them through the crowdfunder people can just plug them in, follow the instructions, and start hosting the network and earning Holo fuel.

MS: Holo is a bridge between the old internet and the new internet. The people who are running holo are the bridge builders who get paid for building the bridge. So, normal internet users don’t have to do anything new – they might not even know that when they visit a website, on the backend, there is a community rather than a company.

OSB: I love the fact that Holo’s currency, Holo fuel, is both backed by computer processing power and designed to work as a mutual credit system.

MS: Holo also provides a new accounting process, which solves two problems: giant volumes of transactions and low transaction costs. We don’t even need to own the structures to do the accounting – we’re using a distributed app for that too – a payment system, so we are able to offer payment processing as well as hosting – for less than anyone currently offers. We’ll be able to process millions or billions of simultaneous payments – and have them work even when the transaction value is 1 cent or less. I’m not going to send you 2p if it costs me 20p to do so… We think we’ve solved an important issue.  The cost of accounting needs to be far less than the values exchanged.

OSB: Absolutely. I’ve seen that very problem plague existing blockchain projects, so I really hope it is something Holo solves. Speaking of finances, you seemed to take great care to ensure the ICO was ethically managed and you’ve now raised a huge amount of money! What are your first plans with your new resources?

MS: Our goals were clear:

1. Get this off the ground – launch the change
2. Make sure the humans get taken care of for their part in that…

It’s a principle we’re going to follow with the whole community of hosts, and ICO investors. We’ve been trying to design the architecture so people end up better off by participating. We’re taking care of our staff and the community that are trying to get the software built. But we’re not trying to become billionaires.

Our people have been living on $1000/month stipend and volunteering their time.

Two years ago I was sleeping in my car to be able to work on this full time. I hard to rent out my bedroom on Airbnb, so I could work on this without having to work on other stuff.  That generally meant that I would sleep in the car. Now our project has market cap worth hundreds of millions. But we’ll let that happen… it’s just people betting that we’ll be successful. The point is that now we have the resources we need, the ability to pay people and pull in deep knowledge.

OSB: How is the Holo organisation going to evolve?

MS: We’re in a transition period. We didn’t do anything in the normal way. We didn’t give any equity in the company to investors. We didn’t even give equity to the employees. I don’t have equity, for instance, because our intent is to hand over control of the resources to the community over time.

We’re aiming to start by using a CoBudget-like process so that our community will control 1 to 3 % of the revenue. There will be a learning process, so the community can build up it’s ability to make decisions and exercise judgement about how to allocate resources, towards training / UI / development / security tools etc. Over time the plan is to increase the amount of the revenue which the community controls until the community controls all of the revenue.

We’re also launching a Trust that controls Holochain. That trust receives 50% of Holo’s revenues and that will help to support Holochain and nourish the growth of the network. Basically we’ve managed to hack together a funding mechanism for Holochain, despite the fact that we are completely giving Holochain away for free.

OSB: So, do you think Holo will help liberate decentralised co-operation at scale?

MS: We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

This concept of putting users in the middle will completely shift how co-ops can function. It will enable them to make use of the advantage that they have, which is diversity. What we are calling platform co-ops and protocol co-ops – coming together in alignment to create an ecosystem rather than just a network. So we can try new things and if they prove useful, they can propagate across the community and perhaps beyond. The “beyond” comes from the fact that users can bridge between different networks.  That means that I can draw data from 5 or 10 apps and combine them together to create a more coherent user experience for myself. And I don’t need anyone else to agree to also use that particular configuration. If it works for me, I can put it to work. No group meetings and voting required (for that sort of issue, anyway.),

No more top down, or one-size fits all application experiences, that’s centralised corporate architecture. New ways of digital commutation are going to harness the diversity of co-ops and help give them a learning advantage. This will allow them to experiment and learn faster than centralised organisations – a collaborative advantage in a world that changing fast.

Part 2 of this interview – exploring more of Holo’s plans to enable decentralised co-operation at scale is coming soon…

Matthew Schutte and Art Brock from Holochain will both be speaking at the OPEN 2018 Platform Co-ops conference in London in July – as well as running hands-on workshops on how to download the source code and design apps to work on Holochain.

We’re not the only people who are starting to get excited about Holochain, the concept has caught many other eyes. With developers like Nicolas Luck explaining how Holochain is reinventing applications and how it “works and performs better than Ethereum by several orders of magnitude”, and Jean Russell sharing 5 Ways Holochain can save democracy, momentum is starting to build.

In his post about Holochain reinventing applications Nicolas shares his vision, explains the shift from data-centric to agent-centric architecture and proposes building a Holo browser:

“I am talking about a browser for the Holochain app ecosystem that is not opening HTML documents but instead is facilitating communication between the user and other users, groups, teams, organizations and the network as a whole. Think: decentralized WeChat. Basically a very generalized address book/team chat/social network/collaboration UI with no specialized functionality as that is to be filled-in by those many apps which are meant to work together as micro-services.”

That is exactly what we have tried to illustrate with PLANET, which is why this is all so exciting. If the users co-own and co-design the browser which Nicolas describes we will finally have a framework within which we can build a democratic, collaborative, sustainable economy – the perfect framework for decentralised cooperation at scale.

Cross-posted from open.coop

Read part II of the interview: “Holochain – The commons engine“

Photo by torbakhopper

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Spending some time in Cuba recently was a good opportunity to consider the problems of trying to common institutions from the inside, that is to say, bring them under the control and effective ownership of those who they affect, and particularly those who work within them. Applying this to the institutions that structure our daily life would require a radical transformation in the way we think. It is not natural for us to think of them as our institutions, to take responsibility for them, to work together with others to nurture them. It is tempting, given the radical change needed, to say that we should scrap the old institutions and start again. Yet in societies as complex as ours, it doesn’t seem viable to suggest a clean slate. We are up to our necks in authoritarian, undemocratic institutions – workplaces worst of all – and we are entirely reliant on them. We can’t abolish them and start again, for ordinary people would suffer at least as much as the owners of the institutions. So it seems we have no option but to change them to suit ourselves.

To be in Cuba is to remember how difficult it is to change authoritarian institutions. It is difficult, and not always illuminating, to talk to Cubans about politics directly, but most people are happy to talk about the economy. Many are appreciative of the welfare state elements of the Cuban economy, and as someone who has been to many Latin American countries it was a pleasure to see so much less deep poverty in Cuba than in most of the continent. But it seems that nobody, including the government, knows how to get an increased standard of living out of the state economy. Increasingly then the government response has been to open up to the private sector, with a mixture of large infrastructure contracts and small businesses for everyday services. Having a tightly controlled private economy would be the dream of many people, and some Cubans are undoubtedly happy with the government’s direction, but for many Cubans the centrally-controlled market/state economy is a constant obstacle course to negotiate. They do not feel in control of the decisions the government makes about which parts of the economy to privatise and how much, or where the resources of the nationalised parts of the economy are to be spent. The markets that develop out of the privatised sectors can be highly anomalous – second hand cars costing tens of thousands of dollars being an example.

Our own markets are equally full of such strange distortions: the price of houses, the failure rate of small businesses due to rent, the externalisation of environmental damage. This gets naturalised as something we can do nothing about. In Cuba, people at least know it is a result of government decisions, and to some extent a result of the US embargo. They know too that they can do almost nothing about it, for the government reacts to protests with violence. This seems to me to be very sad, because people have an instinct to make institutions they are part of work for them. It is one of the failures of Cuba that it has not permitted this type of institutional democracy. But no less sad is the resignation many people feel at market strangeness and authoritarian work environments in Western economies. They can’t be put in prison, it is true, but poverty is another type of prison, and not playing the game means exactly that.

Cuba provides another warning here. The lack of support of many for the Cuban government springs from one main well: dissatisfaction with the material standard of living. This is for many people the main objection to the government, rather than a lack of political freedom they often barely notice in reality. For a time nothing marked the success of the regime as much as the government’s ability to provide. Now nothing marks its failure so much as the government salary and the failure to provide. There is a collectivity felt by many Cubans, they like to work for the government, aware they are contributing to their community and nation, but even these people throw up their hands in despair at the government salary. It is a stark reminder that support for any economic project is contingent on its ability to meet people’s needs and desires. We could invent the most theoretically sound economy in the world, but if the shops were half empty as in Cuba, it would get little support. We should think carefully about whether transitions to a new economy are politically viable. If we cannot maintain broad political support for a commoning economy it would not last long.

Challenging the institutions

But on now to glimmers of hope: one of the most interesting phenomena in Cuba at present is that of ever-increasing internet access. Most people can only access internet on Wi-Fi in public parks, but increasingly even private homes are able to obtain Wi-Fi routers. There is a vibrant Cuban blogging community, and sites such as the Havana Times emerging to criticise the government from left as well as right. For people who fear to communicate with each other, the internet is a gift.

If we follow the parallel with authoritarian institutions in the West, particularly workplaces, one wonders whether the internet has truly been exploited to the full yet. A few websites such as glassdoor.com allow employees to take a measure of revenge on bad employers, but this is tinkering around the edges. We need to ask whether we can find a way for people of an anti-authority persuasion to begin to interact with each other from within the belly of the beasts. Trade unions, it is true, have been the traditional vehicle for exerting employee power in the workplace, but they have their limits, and one of them is that they have rarely sought to undo the boss-worker relationship.

Yet the task of challenging the bosses feels too intimidating for us to even begin, for any open declaration of intent would be met with the termination of our employment. If we want to undo that relationship, if we want to common our institutions, we will often have to campaign in secret. Now on online blogs such as this, we can at least begin to imagine it. The next step is surely to ask whether we can we build platforms specifically for those who live in fear of their bosses, for those who don’t accept the authoritarian rule of the markets. Can we bring together those people in organisations who know they should have their say in the running of the organisation? Where are the anti-authoritarian workplace apps? Where is the wikileaks for circulating documents within a company or within an industry? Where are the apps to link garment workers in Bangladesh with shop workers in London? We have the opportunity to develop a new movement of resistance to authoritarian institutions. Are we only slow to move because it is hard to fund such platforms? Or are we still frightened?

There is every reason to be scared, but perhaps we can start to use our new communications technologies to face our fears. One of the lessons we can learn from Cuba and many other countries around the world is that it is sometimes the internet that makes opposing authoritarianism go from feeling impossible to feeling merely difficult. Difficult is fine. We are just at the beginning.

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Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?

We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.

Code paid by the people should be available to the people!

Reposted from PublicCode.eu

REASONS FOR PUBLIC CODE

• Tax savings: Similar applications don’t have to be programmed from scratch every time.
• Collaboration: Efforts on major projects can share expertise and costs.
• Serving the public: Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone.
• Fostering innovation: With transparent processes, others don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Free Software gives everybody the right to use, study, share and improve software. This right helps support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy.

Do you believe that Free Software should be the default option for publicly financed software? Let’s convince your political representatives!

Sign the letter here!

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