Michele Metts
freescholar / @MickyMetts

benjamin melançon
_@mlncn

The Future
is Here

What's Drupal
got to do with it?

Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.

Cory Doctorow, "The coming civil war over general purpose computing"

We're coming up on the 30th anniversary of the first computer virus, called Brain. By two brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, who still do business as Brain Computer Services. In one version of the story, they were used to UNIX and wrote it to show how shockingly bad the new Microsoft computers security was. In another version, they were attempting to track copyright theft. One person can have multiple motivations, and there were two of them; likely both versions of the story are true. They did not have malicious intent, of that there's no doubt: they wrote their address right into the boot sector of the infected floppy disks The point is that horribly insecure things can become global standards. The economic cost of computer viruses is estimated - wildly, but estimated - at $100B annually.

I think the political and economic consequences of not having control of our software is the big danger, but it really is a matter of life and death. Which is not to say that software has not made us safer, and won't make great leaps in safety in the future.

Free software has a funding problem.

At the Boston Drupal meetup on Tuesday, almost the entire room used directly built on Open Source Free Software to earn their living. Ninety percent of the room used proprietary 'integrated development environments'. If free software can't win in this market, how is it going to win among the billions more people who need Free Software to have control over their lives, but don't even know about it yet?

Why are we using proprietary IDEs? Well, we're finding them better, in the sense that they are easier to use to get our day-to-day work done. Better than the Free Software alternatives.

Open Source Free Software has seen some of its biggest successes in a couple categories.

Neubie, Money Hand

Almost all SaaS services are already built on Free Software.

Free Software has the best maintainability and scalability. Every hot startup or excellent service you can think of, from Facebook to Slack to AirBnB to Google, uses Free Software. The entire stack of almost all of them are built on Free Software, from GNU/Linux to Apache to Nginx to PHP to Python to React.js... it's just the last thing they put together with all this Free Software that's not being shared, because the founders or the owners are looking to multiply their investments by hundreds of times, which they can only do by holding a monopoly by any means available, including proprietary software. So we can't re-use the funding model which proprietary software as a service is using, but while we're looking for a business model, software as a service, interpreted broadly, seems to be where it's at.

Okay, then, let's look at *Free* Software as a Service. Where does it have a competitive advantage?

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take data and functionality elsewhere

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take the platform in a new direction

Free Software as a Service

Security for development partners

Companies with valuations based largely on your data

Acxiom ($1.3B)
Uber ($41B)
Palantir Technologies ($10B)
Yelp ($1.47B)
Facebook ($255B)
Google ($403B)

I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?

xkcd.com/1390

As value shifts from software to the ability to leverage data, companies will have to rethink their businesses, just as Netflix and Google did.

Dries Buytaert

This shift has the potential to greatly advantage cooperatives, and, if you'll pardon the phrase, liberate software used by platforms to be free software— like all the components in the stack making this software already, it won't be the competitive edge for most companies. Instead, the competitive edge may be the trustworthiness of networks and the stewardship of data— and the one-member, one-vote ownership of platform cooperatives may engender greater trust.

when the value is blatantly in the data, people may be more interested in owning the networks — health, social, financial, and otherwise — that first receive their data http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/this-company-has-built-a-profile-on-every-american-adult

Dries Buytaert, The future of software is data-driven

Platform Cooperatives

Customers first

Platform Cooperatives

Ownership effect

InternetOfOwnership.net

Platform cooperatives, a twist on the century-old ideas of consumer, producer, and solidarity cooperatives, are already becoming a movement. They featured at the national conference of worker cooperatives that ended last week. You can learn about many of the players at InternetOfOwnership.net. Notion of sharing economy potential more access, but that's not the same as owning the means of production. - An online marketplace, with ubiquitous access, so usually accessed via smartphone. Transactions at an ever lower threshold of cost. - What makes platform successful is capturing of attention, ubiquity-- the network effect (decentralized across [access?] + critical mass) - Connectig content/labor providers and users - Access to and leveraging unconventional capital with limited to no exit or liquidity, with fair trade expectations of return, people expecting to lend money and get a fair rate of return, not 100X, know it's a marketplace built to last - Utilizing "Intellectual Property" assets, often pursuant to open source or Creative Commons licensing. Dominant legal model in this country is you [if you are a corporation] have idea and use it, and it is controlled by you. Patent monopoly 20 years. How do we have growth in intellectual value, but spread that value. Ideally we use free software but in short term can build IP value and brand value like they do, but distribute the [benefits] of the value widely.

Michele Metts
freescholar / @MickyMetts

benjamin melançon
_@mlncn

agaric.com

etherpad.net/p/drupal-future

The Future
is Here

What's Drupal
got to do with it?

Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.

Almost all SaaS services are already built on Free Software.

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take data and functionality elsewhere

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take the platform in a new direction

Free Software as a Service

Security for development partners

Companies with valuations based largely on your data

Platform Cooperatives

Customers first

Platform Cooperatives

Ownership effect

etherpad.net/p/drupal-future

ben@agaric.com
@mlncn

micky@agaric.com
freescholar / @MickyMetts

Michele Metts freescholar / @MickyMetts

benjamin melançon @mlncn

agaric.com

etherpad.net/p/drupal-future

The Futureis Here

What's Drupalgot to do with it?

Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.

Almost all SaaS services are already built on Free Software.

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take data and functionality elsewhere

Free Software as a Service

Freedom to take the platform in a new direction

Free Software as a Service

Security for development partners

Companies with valuations based largely on your data

Platform Cooperatives

Customers first

Platform Cooperatives

Ownership effect

etherpad.net/p/drupal-future

ben@agaric.com @mlncn

micky@agaric.com freescholar / @MickyMetts

Michele Metts
freescholar / @MickyMetts

benjamin melançon
_@mlncn

The Future
is Here

What's Drupal
got to do with it?

ben@agaric.com
@mlncn

micky@agaric.com
freescholar / @MickyMetts