What does the community want to do with openmanufacturing.org?
Heath Matlock
I've also considered forming an NPO, so that if people wanted to contribute money to this community;s cause they could. Doing so would require us to elect a board directors, formulate a budget, bylaws, mission statement, and vision statement. I'm hesitant to do anything just yet without first the community members giving input.
Bryan Bishop
> also thought it would be a great place to keep a repository of hardware
> designs and manufacturing processes, but it seems a few are opposed to such
> an idea looking at comments of similar sites that have been discussed here.
I must be missing something. What opposition to hardware repositories
has there been? Could you cite any particular discussions?
Heath Matlock
Paul D. Fernhout
The issue of creating formal organizations is always fraught with issues
(including equity). Often, the fastest way to get people fighting or not
talking is to drop some money in front of them. :-) Still, we live in the
society we do, and more money going to open manufacturing would be a good
thing in general -- as long as it does not otherwise compromise getting
people involved. Free software has many of the same issues with managing
money and fund raising.
And stuff like this certainly is exciting:
"Fedora Commons Awarded $4.9M Grant to Develop Open-Source Software for
Building Collaborative Information Communities"
http://www.moore.org/newsitem.aspx?id=2172
"With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support
the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates
open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and
educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by
Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a
networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars,
teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new
ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues
worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system,
developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the
new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the
intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The
result will be an open source software platform that both enables
collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides
sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our
intellectual, scientific, and cultural history."
Maybe you know all this already, but I'll outline some basics here about
non-profits.
Anyone can start non-profits that are not tax-exempt run by one person in
many states. There is not much difference from a one person corporation in
many ways (the non-profit form just does not have stock that can be sold).
Generic non-tax-exempt non-profits can even take donations, but people can't
write them off on their taxes.
But in order for non-profits in the USA to become "tax exempt" and take
donations that are tax exempt, they need to look and act a certain way, to
please the IRS and to please potential donors like foundations. (Other
countries have other rules.)
Also, non-profits that are tax-exempt in the USA work best with a volunteer
board, where no one on the board gets paid for anything they do (travel
reimbursements and stuff like that excepted). However, usually when some
individual wants to set up a non-profit it with an eye to getting grants or
donations to pay themselves a salary (typically as an "executive director").
There is nothing directly wrong with that, except that for a tax exempt
non-profit, it goes against the volunteer nature of the thing to have such a
person on the board in a voting role. It's not that it isn't ever done, it's
just that it looks bad, and may create problems down the road. But, if you
have a board controlling the finances of an organization, then you have a
lot less control over what happens (which is the point). And even when the
paid executive director votes on the minimal board of three people (in most
states), they can still be outvoted. So, you have to trust the other board
members to adhere to the purpose and other informal expectations about
equity if you are going to sink a lot of your own time into building up an
organization. For example, what if the executive director does get a million
dollar grant for the organization (after working for no or a low salary),
and then the other board members fire him or her and put another friend of
theirs in as a new executive director instead? Unlikely, but that is the
kind of thing that can happen. What protection does the executive director have?
Some non-profit people finesse the issue of needing a board by having their
friends on the boards, and being on the boards of friend's non-profits, in a
cosy relationship. :-) I'm not sure how legal that is entirely though, or
ethical if it is legal. But, in any case, the board (even of friends, who
sometimes get to be ex-friends for various reasons) still is making the
decisions, and could fire the executive director and redirect the assets
(including copyrights). Also, in practice, successful non-profits have
active boards full of committed and knowledgeable people who help out the
organization. A board of friends in unrelated endeavors is not going to do
that if they are just on the board to satisfy the legal minimum
requirements. And of course, any board a person is on does take time, and
can potentially create liability for that person, even with "director's
insurance" and the liability shield of a corporation. It's best to do things
above board and straightforwardly, but it is sometimes harder at first, and
often may be too hard.
In any case, I'm just providing a peek into the social dynamics of
non-profits that manage assets, and issues of trust and expectations. And
that is a pathological case as I outlined above, generally people who can
raise funds are highly prized in the non-profit world, and often the board
just does whatever the executive director suggests. It's a complex social
dynamics thing, depending on the personalities involved, their commitment to
some common cause, how well they know each other, how desperate they are,
and so on.
Nolo has some good resources on non-profits in general:
http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/CE94A6B3-EFB6-4036-8498D5414328FD73/111/262/
One example:
http://www.nolo.com/article.cfm/catId/CE94A6B3-EFB6-4036-8498D5414328FD73/objectId/FBD2ED42-161F-4E20-840DE3AA184D2ACD/111/262/QNA/
"Generally, a board will not be saddled with a failing nonprofit's debt. But
that's no reason to look the other way. A board member may be held
personally liable for unpaid taxes and penalties for failure to file returns
or see that payroll taxes are withheld and paid. Also, if a board decision
or lack of a decision is grossly negligent, board members are sometimes held
personally responsible. The bottom line is that it is best to resign from a
loosely run board unless you are covered by an adequate D & O liability
policy (directors and officers liability policy)."
A key concept to understand is "self-dealing" and how to avoid that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-dealing
In the case of running an open manufacturing place, like another Factor e
Farm, there is also the question of whether the benefits received there if
you get food and housing and utilities etc. are essentially salary or
whether they are for the convenience of the organization's mission. So,
there is another issue there.
It seems that even non-profit charters aren't enough to keep copyrights
free, as a future board could change the charter. What seems to work best is
contracts with the non-profit that tie down what it can do with copyrights
or assets in the future. Of course, that constrains flexibility. But
something like, all copyrights developed should be under FSF Free or Open
Source definition acceptable licenses seems like it might be OK to write
into contracts with employees or such (protecting the employee).
But the legal issues don't always talk about the social ones.
I've invested person-months thinking about non-profit issues; it is not
trivial. And I still haven't formed one. :-) In part over the board issue.
But the world continues to change. So do I.
Essentially, a non-profit is a small business. It has lots of business
issues related to it (including people ones) and many of them can be
unpleasant if you want to focus on making stuff more that process issues.
:-) You are, in some sense, all going into business together. It's a weird
kind of business, fundraising and dealing with volunteers and giving stuff
away, but it still has many of the same issues as any business.
The biggest issue at the start is of course, what does one want to raise
money for? And where will it come from? And how long will that all take? For
good, or bad, a non-profit is essentially a small business (I repeat that)
and those issues all relate to a sort of business plan (at least as a
sketch). It usually takes a couple thousand dollars and significant time to
get a non-profit launched if it is to be tax-exempt; one issue is, is it
worth it?
I knew someone who started a non-profit with some other people, and after a
year finally got a small grant, but overall they maybe made less than
minimum wage. Still, from the visibility of that non-profit and from doing
good stuff there helped them move on to other things that paid better.
But I know of others who started non-profits that grew into huge things,
even just over the past decade.
Part of it is also how many assets (social networks, parental money) the
non-profit leadership brings to the group. That's also a competitive aspect
-- any new non-profit is competing for funds against other non-profits where
the executive director has no student loans, a condo in NYC, multiple Ivy
League degrees, and so on, courtesy of their parents, plus the large social
network that comes from all that. These are the people you may be
essentially fighting against about grants. Of course, there is still
something to be said for hard work and motivation, so it is not all one
sided. But, it's not a level playing field. One also thinks what a wonderful
job it would be to work at a foundation and give out money, but because
there is so little money relative to the need, the main thing a foundation
staffer learns to do is say "no", as they guard the foundations assets.
That's a reason why Michael Phillips in the Seven Laws of Money said, from
his experience giving out money at a foundation, you usually can't really
give money away (effectively) -- both because it comes with strings, and
also the grant requesting process rewards the wrong people (those who write
good grants, not those who do good work).
There are some more systematic issues with grants:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Towards_a_Free_Matter_Economy#Discussion:_Funding_Issues
"However, grant money, once given, is extremely hard to get back. So when a
person applies for a grant they must endure a gauntlet of tests, intended to
prove to the granting agency that that person is willing and able to fulfill
the promise they make in their proposal. If a grant is received, will the
project be completed? How much money will it cost? Real research is full of
unexpected set-backs and cost-overruns. Real researchers are full of
optimism and unrealistic deadlines. The skills for research, development,
logistics, and management are rarely found all in one person—good scientists
rarely make good accountants, let alone good receptionists. This encourages
the granting agency to be very selective and take few risks with whom they
fund. Researchers must have a proven professional background, track-record
of honesty, and a reputation to protect. This is why funding by grants
requires the use of large government, foundation, and university
bureaucracies, and only the professionals who have climbed the career ladder
to positions in these organizations have a serious chance of benefitting
from them. The “solitary inventor” is indeed dealt out of this game, just as
Eisenhower predicted.""
Also, there is a question of how in-tune the non-profit is to the powers
that be or the zeitgeist. For example, I can guarantee you someone could
raise a few million dollars easily for a non-profit from the establishment
to come up with ways to *prevent* people from doing open manufacturing. :-(
On the other hand, one might think open manufacturing is in tune with the
zeitgeist, and so might get support at the grassroots or with some
progressive parts of the government.
This is a non-profit doing educational free software that I respect:
http://www.concord.org/
Most of their stuff is put out under the LGPL. They mostly get grants to
develop education software for K-12 kids. Presumably, most of the money they
raise goes to salaries.
However, salaries mixed into an otherwise volunteer effort also have a
potential for creating conflict or bad vibes. It's one thing to have a
post-scarcity society for everyone; it is more complex to have a
post-scarcity society for only some.
Unlike software, there are other reasons for raising money than salaries.
Most software development these days does not need costly infrastructure
beyond a PC and an interenet connection. But CNC machines and robots and
materials and electricity and disposal/recyling costs can cost a lot of
money. There are also much greater liability issues around equipment that
would just as soon saw your hand off as saw a board in two -- just like a
CPU, a bandsaw doesn't care what it is doing (as far as we know. :-) So, to
do work on open manufacturing, like at Factor e Farm, sure, I can see
reasons why money for stuff other than salaries is useful.
If there is a good reason to raise money, there are also groups that can act
like "fiscal sponsors" that have already gone through the paperwork and six
months to two years delays with the IRS to become tax exempt, including
having a board that is dedicated to a related purpose.
Tides was a classic one,
http://www.tides.org/
and my wife and I talked with them a decade ago about being under their wing
with our garden simulator software, but it wasn't 100% clear about some
hypothetical issues then when open source was still newer (as in, could
someone argue it was fiscally irresponsible of a non-profit to not license
its source for a fee?).
But a lot has changed in the past decade. Tides now is only accepting big
projects ($100K annual revenues already). But, there are new groups like
this that might be a better fit:
http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/
"The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization composed of Free and
Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FOSS projects,
the Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and
administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and
artistic decisions. By joining the Conservancy, member FOSS projects obtain
the benefits of a formal legal structure while keeping themselves focused on
software development. These benefits include, most notably, the ability to
collect earmarked project donations and protection from personal liability
for the developers of the project. Another benefit of joining the
Conservancy is that projects can use it to hold assets, which are managed by
the Conservancy on behalf of and at the direction of the project. The
Conservancy is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so member projects can
receive tax-deductible donations to the extent allowed by law. To make a
donation to the Conservancy or to its member projects, please visit our
donations page. If you think your FOSS project might benefit from joining
the Conservancy, please contact us."
There are other groups, like Debian's sponsor, SPI, that are non-profit too.
And there is the Apache project.
However, whether any of them would take on liability associated with various
forms of manufacturing issues and content they are unfamiliar with is
another issue.
That also is actually one value of universities, they can serve essentially
as a non-profit fiscal sponsor, though they usually take a huge cut of any
grants (often more that 50%).
Again, though the issue is, does all the paperwork really accomplish
anything? It's true having a group of people with a common purpose can be a
good thing, and the paperwork can help refine that. But, again, unless there
is a clear plan how to raise and spend money, it's a lot of effort for an
unsure reason. You can look at the Squeak Foundation as an example. It takes
people a lot of time, but has it raised money that has made much of a change?
http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/
I'm not saying their leadership and licensing and other work are not
important, just that it is not clear to me the money aspect matters or that
they have received any significant donations of money (as opposed to code).
Yet, on the other hand, Viewpoints Research, another Squeak related
non-profit has gotten grants and paid salaries, but they have Alan Kay, a
luminary in the field of computing.
http://www.vpri.org/
As I see it, most people here would probably not mind getting a salary from
a non-profit to do open manufacturing. :-) But it is more problematical how
many people here would want to serve on an unpaid board (and incurring
related liability and distraction) to supervise grants and then hire other
people to do that work they want to do. I'm not saying people won't do it,
and new non-profits that are tax exempt get formed all the time, just that
it is one thing to have a bunch of money and form a non-profit to spend it,
and a different thing to form a non-profit thinking that will attract a
bunch of money.
Also, the lines are blurring these days between for-profits, and
non-profits, and groups of people on a mailing list. There are for-profits
that act more like non-profits, and non-profits that act more like for
profits, so again, it depends exactly what one wants to do. Factor e Farm
has shunned both the non-profit and for-profit formalisms, for example:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Transparency
With all that said, I'm certain there will be tax-exempt non-profits doing
open manufacturing research and development. I'm not saying it is a bad idea
in general to form such an organization. And while any social process can
have problems, when it works, it can be great. I'm just saying there are a
lot of issues to consider, in terms of what people are trying to achieve.
And in the process of thinking about that, one might also think about
whether these efforts can fit into existing institutions or not, and why or
why not, because, at the very least, funders might ask that question.
Anyway, these sorts of issues can consume a vast amount of time and energy,
without any progress beyond a bunch of legal paperwork that creates future
obligations of time and energy to keep up with. It's hard to know when it is
worth it. But that does not mean it never is.
--Paul Fernhout
Joseph Jackson
trying to get a tax exempt non profit off the ground, I can attest to
the difficulties and emphasize the preferred scenario is to have a
bunch of money and then form an organization to spend it. I've tried
forming one to attract $ and spent significant amounts on legal fees
and accounting simply to report 0 income while we tried to navigate
the grant system.
You can get tax exempt status approved no problem by using some expert
law firms that facilitate this--I filed in Nov 06 and got the IRS
provisional ruling by July 07. This cost approx $1400. It took until
March 08 to land our first grant which then fell apart when our
partner organization, a university in Brazil, removed their offer of
housing/office space and STILL asserted a 30% cut of the $ for
"administrative" and "brand" purposes while appointing one of their
full time staff as an intermediary and paying him an extra salary to
oversee the project we had conceived. After 18 months of "working for
free" my partner and I saw this as intolerable since there wouldn't be
sufficient funds to do a decent job and we seemed to be bringing $ to
this institution in Brazil to simply enrich the 6 research staff that
had secure, full time positions and already drew salaries at the
center.
In retrospect, I had expected my board members to take a much more
active role in helping us master the grant system and get
established. We didn't do a good job communicating in this respect.
My initial directors were all quite busy (one oversees an entire
department at the Australian National University) and I should have
know they didn't want further administrative duties.
Another horror story: this last year I wanted a simple answer as to
whether my 501(c)(3), initial chartered to do "policy research"
regarding open source biology, could solicit $ to fund development of
an ultra cheap pcr machine, which should be compatible with our
general "educational/scientific" purposes but which was not
anticipated at the time I filed my original program descriptions with
the IRS.
The first option was to do a phone consult with the original firm I
used to get set up. This would be 350$ an hour, pro rated, so I could
try to talk fast! Stupidly trying to save money, I used a family
connection to find a lawyer who only charged $190 an hour and led me
to believe it "shouldn't take long" and that we could pay whenever we
got some funding. This was a fairly close connection as well--a
patient of my Aunt, who was his eye doctor and had even given his new
wife a bridal shower, etc.
I met with this lawyer and explained that we'd likely end up forming a
separate company to eventually commercialize this machine but wanted a
simple answer as to whether we could use the existing 501(c)3 to fund
R&D. NEVER trust a lawyer. ALWAYS negotiate for a fixed fee.
8 wks later I received an itemized bill charged me for EVERY
interaction we'd ever had, all the way back to the very first phone
call where I asked about his services. Each time he emailed me,
without my asking him to of course, he'd charge for .1 of an hour (6
minutes to do an email). I'd reply and he'd charge to read that!
Charges of $19, $28.50, etc.
Eg, email to the manager of the state venture capital fund director--
email to tell me he'd emailed the VC guy. Calls me up one day to say
he'd had the director of the university tech incubator program in his
office and mentioned me to him, how thoughtful--$28.50. Offer to
update the bylaws, etc.
Total Bill $1,300. I couldn't see straight for a month I was so
angry after this. "Saving the world" doesn't come cheap and it is a
thankless job.
It can still be worthwhile to form a tax exempt organization, but you
need to work out your funding strategy well in advance and make sure
you have a committed group who can put in the time. Insufficient
planning, as in my case, will cost you a lot while you learn expensive
lessons. Sadly, there may not be a much cheaper way to do this,
because you will be hit with a lot of fees no matter what--just try to
get your fund raising underway fast.
Paul D. Fernhout
> A very insightful piece from Paul as always.
> After 2 yrs experience
> trying to get a tax exempt non profit off the ground, I can attest to
> the difficulties and emphasize the preferred scenario is to have a
> bunch of money and then form an organization to spend it. I've tried
> forming one to attract $ and spent significant amounts on legal fees
> and accounting simply to report 0 income while we tried to navigate
> the grant system.
Thanks, and thanks also for the detailed story from your experienced in the
school of hard knocks. People who have been getting funding for years have
all kinds of tricks for fleecing the inexperienced. Reminds me of when in my
twenties I went into a lamp store on Nassau Street in Princeton to tell the
owner about fluorescent lightbulbs (I was trying to educate people about
them in the 1980s), thinking I might even sell him some, and came out having
bought an expensive lamp. :-) Long term academics know how to play the
foundation game well. And some people are just great at sales.
I'm just going to talk out loud as I think about some non-profit/for-profit
issues myself in the context of developing an education simulation about
post-scarcity issues (and related stuff).
===
For various reasons (losing a major client, and the general downturn) my
wife is strongly "encouraging" me to earn money again after a rather long
run of not worrying much about that. :-) So, I will have less time for doing
more free stuff from here on in, unless I can come up with some other
approach to support us.
While OSCOMAK and the Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop are very near to my
heart, short of a grant like others got for the recently completed NEPOMUK
SSD project, I just don't see those as having the potential to bring in any
revenue in the short term (at least, not without distorting them way beyond
what I wanted them to be). They are fundamentally things that need to be
open to have any chance at all to be adopted. And Wikipedia has set the
standard for no advertising on a collaborative site.
As for grants, I don't see how I could effectively compete on getting grants
for either OSCOMAK or the Pointrel SSD with the endless supplies of people
with PhDs related to manufacturing and computer science putting in
applications for various things (and I do not have a PhD, despite bouncing
around in a few PhD graduate programs). At best, my proposal would likely
get rejected (as a couple times before), and a couple years later a reviewer
who did not even consciously remember might just get a grant to do the same
thing. I'd still like someone to do those kind of things even if it was not
me, so maybe that is OK, but it's not worth the trouble to me in that sense.
And that's not just my paranoia talking, here is the Vice Provost of Caltech
(David Goodstein) saying it fifteen years ago when times were better for
academia (things are worse now):
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"""
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer
review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical
danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to
publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to
decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in
some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees
who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose
identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals.
Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what
results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of
science. Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science.
Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary
or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so
long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not
at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for
editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this,
not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of
interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This
point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to
any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the
black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to
avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own
interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical
standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by
unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many
examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential
expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult
future we face [due to exponential growth in academia having hit limits.]
"""
But even if those projects are too big to get going as wholes, certain
aspects of creating sustainable worlds or sharing things socially are of
interest to a lot of people. So, in the short term, I've been thinking about
making some cooperative computer games of some sort, also related to
progressive and post-scarcity issues. Maybe as part of a non-profit somehow,
maybe not. I could instead try to sell a game or have advertising in or on a
game, but I'd rather just give stuff away, especially as I could then invite
collaboration on the source and content (a new sort of volunteer management
in the internet age). The question is, which makes sense, if either?
Mark Surman of the Shuttleworth foundation suggests a flow into foundations
of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 or so years:
"Is Open Source the Answer To Giving? "
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1313223
And Clay Shirky suggests TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year:
"Mining the Cognitive Surplus"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258
So, clearly in general, the world has plenty of charitable dollars for free
and open source software, and there are plenty of potential collaborators
and users. But, finances can still be issues on a microeconomic level. :-)
And there is a vast competition for those funds and eyeballs, as Goodstein
suggests.
I'm thinking a non-profit could look a lot like the "Concord Consortium",
http://www.concord.org/
which is a tax-exempt non-profit which raises grants (and takes donations)
to do free software and free content. Concord focuses more on mainstream
science education (K-12). I have not approached them about working with
them, but that is one possibility. However, I see this new group as focusing
more on a sometimes "edgy" progressive post-scarcity global-abundance agenda
at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Kind of like all
the stuff I have been posting. :-) So, it is a bit more political in nature
(even though it would not directly attempt to influence the political
process) than Concord's past work, and thus I think it would not fit with
them. So, I don't want to embarrass either me or them by asking. :-)
For some examples, maybe a new non-profit would develop games about the
sustainable greening of Princeton University, or about developing
ethics-driven robot software, or a game about building 3D worlds people
share for free, or about where you figure out how to do cradle-to-cradle
manufacturing to keep your city sustainable, or how people grow roots that
give meaning in their lives in various types of societies, or even maybe
about agriculture done cooperatively somehow improving on our previous
garden simulator work, and so on. And maybe these would not all be big
games, but maybe some might just take a few minutes to play. There's lots of
possibilities. And while I'm mainly seeing this as just me as the main
developer at first (or maybe even me and my wife as co-developers), it is
quite possible if the foundation funds were found that it could grow to a
lot of developers working in this area. The more the merrier, really. :-)
As long as that does not significantly impact volunteerism. :-(
Since the line can be blurred between non-profit and for-profit these days,
neither corporate form is a guarantee of core values. You can have
for-profit companies that focus on this transition to post-scarcity as well
as non-profits; one teacher I knew in high school with an educational
computer company on the side just said that the big thing was not to lose
money while doing what you thought worth doing so you could keep at it. In
that sense, I disagree with the comments in a recent thread that indirectly
suggest for-profit use of content might be inherently wrong (I'm not sure
how broad those comments were intended to be though); the issue is more gray
in some cases given where we are now as a society. It's not easy to plot a
course through the haze.
For me, as I think about for-profit vs. non-profit ventures, there are two
issues: one is developing software in an open source way that fosters
collaboration to create good things for the world, the other is promoting
progressive ideas in the current dominant economic paradigm. Ideally, the
two go together, either funded by grants or done as a hobby. Well, my
"hobby" time is about to shrink. While getting grants seems unlikely, I
might be able to earn a subsistence by making proprietary software like a
game that is about these very same issues (like James P. Hogan sells
copyrighted books about moving beyond such things as copyrights and money.
:-) But, that would make me part of the problem again. :-( A foundation
grant (or government support) would take some of the problem away, because
then I could do an open source game about these issues, doing both things at
once, rather than having to pick just one, or do neither. Having said that,
since I've spent years doing open things, while I'm not happy about making a
choice, I don't feel it is complete hypocrisy to make some temporarily
closed things that are about the issues of economic transcendence. :-) I'm
as stuck in this system as anyone is. But it is still sad to have to make
that choice. Or, like Dan Ingalls, who was the major implementor of the
Smalltalk computer language, and is probably still one of the best software
developers on the planet forty years later, I could instead just go run a
hotel for years. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ingalls
However, in the long term, even closed source stuff can be opened up later.
The company id Sofware did that with the famous Doom games; you can get the
source for earlier versions under the GPL, and various researchers are using
that to make simulations about other issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software
"In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code,
John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under
the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been
released once the code base is 5 years old. Consequently, many home grown
projects have sprung up porting the code to different platforms, cleaning up
the source code, or providing major modifications to the core engine.
Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake engine ports are ubiquitous to nearly all
platforms capable of running games, such as hand-held PCs, iPods, the PSP,
the Nintendo DS and more. Impressive core modifications include Darkplaces
which adds stencil shadow volumes into the original Quake engine along with
a more efficient network protocol. Another such project is ioQuake3, which
maintains a goal of cleaning up the source code, adding features and fixing
bugs. The source code to the Quake III engine was previously supposed to
have been released around the end of 2004. However, John Carmack announced
that the GPL release had been put on hold in order to maintain a grace
period, since the Quake III engine was still being licensed to commercial
customers who would otherwise become upset over the sudden loss in value of
their recent investment. The Quake III source code was released under the
GPL on August 19, 2005."
That seems like a great way to get the best talent too, perhaps to write
into developer contracts that anything they work on goes under the GPL in
five years (or LGPL or another free license). If I ran a game company,
that's what I'd do to give people an incentive to do their very best work.
I'd be a lot more inclined to work for a company with that policy, too.
Most neutral people who study copyright suggest that copyright should be
shorter rather than longer in the internet age (if we have it at all).
Stallman, while not neutral, :-) suggests three to five years at most,
because it is so much easier to make money quickly on copyrighted material,
and otherwise copyrights just have a chilling effect and a high cost to
society to prevent collaboration. So, id Software's policy reflects an
attempt at an ethical compromise for a for-profit company selling games.
A core theme I'd like to further explore through simulations and games
(however supported) would be what Einstein said after the explosion of the
first atomic bomb: "The release of atom power has changed everything except
our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of
mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Any advanced technology (whether nuclear technology, biotech, robotics,
nanotech manufacturing or other form of 3D printing, or even just a
bureaucracy like the court system) can function as an amplifier for the
human mind. And all those technologies have the potential to make the world
work well for most everyone (well, I'm not a big nuclear fan, but it
certainly is indisputably useful in medicine). But using advanced
technologies in positive ways requires using them with a post-scarcity
abundance-oriented way of thinking, by fostering abundance for all through
cooperation. Instead, people often think of these powerful technologies from
a mindset of scarcity, and so use the tools of abundance in negative and
competitive ways like to defend a hoard of privilege or to fight over
perceived limited resources. Changing how people think about scarcity and
abundance would be very worth doing IMHO, and one way to do that would be
through computer games and related content and software tools (which are
easily abundant once developed). There are other ways as well (like various
efforts on the P2PFoundation site), but that one I am best suited for with
my computer software background.
I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about non-profit issues in the past,
and even spent hours on the phone with a non-profit lawyer about various
issues years ago (paying, and well worth it, and contact me off-list if you
want that lawyer's contact info as another option), so I'm somewhat familiar
with the basics of this stuff from a process standpoint.
As I mentioned what has always been the biggest stumbling block is the issue
of having an active board, especially if I wanted to draw a salary from the
organization and avoid conflicts-of-interest. Still, in my knowledge about
non-profit boards (mostly environmental and agriculture related) people
generally are on boards because they believe in the topic, but they usually
also get something else out of it too (meeting other people, being
in-the-know about issues affecting their businesses, having the non-profit
indirectly provide some benefit to their own industry, and so on). So for
example, a likely-to-be-active person to get for a board of an organization
making free designs to be printed in 3D printers would be someone who worked
at a company making 3D printers (as long as there were no designs discussed
for printing 3D printers. :-) If you want a board for an organization that
designs medical equipment, find people who might benefit from using it, or
who would supply the materials. And so on. That's one reason boards may
narrow what non-profit's do.
For example, my wife would like to do non-profit stuff related to
communities and stories. I want to do non-profit stuff related to
manufacturing and social semantic desktops and post-scarcity issues. You
would think, great, they can have one non-profit that does both. But in
practice, she can think of people who might be on a board doing what she
wants to do, but we can assume they won't be into post-scarcity stuff. And I
could maybe find board members to be interested in post-scarcity stuff, but
they probably would not be directly interested in story stuff. And if we
were both on the same board ourselves, it is a potential
conflict-of-interest. So, the active board is really a big issue,
especially because the board is volunteer, so they are putting in their time
and taking on some risk for ideals and maybe some incidental indirect
benefits. So, their interest will only go so far. Obviously, we could just
find friends to be on a board of a combined thing, but that misses the point
of an active board. Also, a diffuse organization is harder to pitch to
potential funders. It also mixes liabilities -- why should the post-scarcity
stuff suffer if someone tells a problematical story in a community, or why
should the story stuff suffer if the post-scarcity stuff goes wrong. The
same issue is for the P2PFoundation, it it were to focus more on DIYBio
things like a cheap PCR machine, then it takes on certain risks that are
different than other sorts of endeavors like simulations of policy issues.
And the more variety of projects, the more different risks the organization
is taking on, with less and less deep understanding by the board, which is
asking for trouble, either that something will go wrong with a project or
that the board will get uncomfortable, or both.
My own biggest concern with a non-profit or the grant route these days is
just the risk of spending a lot of time trying to raise funds and seeing
that time wasted if I never get to develop anything later. I have no
significant successful charitable fund raising experience myself (well, I
had an organization with a few members around 1990 who joined, though I gave
the money back when I decided not to push it forward).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
As I look back on that, I think I made the wrong choice to not pursue the
non-profit route, but even more, I think I made the wrong choice in not
somehow aligning my work with an existing related non-profit back then like
the New Alchemy Institute.
And by now, I've posted enough stuff on the internet to take me out of the
mainstream, another difficulty, especially if I try to find consulting back
in the corporate world. In that sense, just making a game to sell, or to get
advertising revenues from, even if it fails to realize any income, is a more
sure thing than chasing after either consulting or grants, in the sense that
I am developing post-scarcity related content from day one instead of
networking and fund-raising to perhaps no success.
Anyway, so it's still a toss up in my mind which route worth pursuing.
In theory, a non-profit getting grants and donations to make free
educational games with open source *should* be the ideal situation, and some
of those games can be about open manufacturing themes, and maybe (like the
issue you raised about scope of a non-profit) other things might fit under
it too (although what may limit scope in practice is more what the board is
comfortable with that what the non-profit corporate charter says, because it
can always be changed).
But that's in theory. In practice, the US economy is heavily oriented around
selling stuff or services, and I've had some success in that and I have no
experience successfully fundraising for grants and donations. And there seem
to be all too many stories like yours (kind of like the same with the very
few musicians that become famous); although likely in your case, if you keep
trying, building on what you've learned, and can keep up your enthusiasm,
you may have a good chance of success.
So, making a proprietary game (and releasing the source under the GPL in a
few years) and hoping for revenue from sales and advertising seems like a
surer thing for me personally. But, that route clearly forsakes developer
community for the most part (at least in those areas) and risks alienating
free and open source developers. But unless I find a better way, the most
likely choice I face is work for someone else on *their* scarcity-related
proprietary software project (which seems worse as a choice, even if no
doubt it would likely pay better and more reliably. :-) Although, I guess
another possibility is some role somewhere working for someone who is doing
research or development or production in something related to advanced
manufacturing or something like that (likely still proprietary though, even
at a university).
In the past, almost all the money we've made has been around selling
consulting services. There was a little money from shareware in the 1990s
(but we could not expand on that as we were tied down by working of debt
through consulting). And there was a little chunk of money I made from
royalties for writing a video game in the early 1980s (when I was about
seventeen) which for good or bad went to pay for Princeton instead of being
reinvested in other games. :-) But that video game I wrote was more than a
quarter century ago. I could have written successors to it, but I remember
consciously deciding to focus on my first year studies at Princeton and also
learning to play the flute. Also, the game I made was called "addictive" in
a positive way which bothered me ("Just say No", right?),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
and it was also about flying a bomber over air defenses (so military themed,
which also bothered me),
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
plus it was highly derivative (which actually did not bother me much at the
time, though it did more later).
Maybe with a different kind of mentoring I might have gotten past those
issues about writing computer games. So, in a sense, now I am mentoring what
remains of that younger self that I was pre-Princeton. :-) And I think
sometimes about mentoring other people that age more directly, but just like
the younger "I" of back then probably would not have listened much to me
now, I don't think other young people that age would listen much either. :-)
Plus, there is a lot I don't know, especially given how fast the world
continues to change.
Still, games seem to be doing well these days, even with the downturn. For
one thing, games are relatively cheap entertainment as people trade down
from bigger expenses, like trips to theme parks, etc. So, some families
won't spend $3000 to spend a week in Florida, but they might then spend $300
to buy ten to thirty games to have the same amount of fun. But, a theme park
is a family experience, most games are not.
There are even a few computer game companies in the geographical area I am
in. But going in different directions.
And of course, a big issue with our society is that people (especially kids)
spend too much time at the computer already. :-)
"Google CEO Tells Grads: Turn Off Your Computers"
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/217600152
Or in other words, will I be saying the computer equivalent of "If you
smoke, please try Carlton"? :-)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/30/business/the-media-business-advertising-cigarette-giants-switch-from-fantasy-to-empathy.html
And there are huge numbers of games out there already. Many of them are free.
"Apple's AppStore Surpasses 25,000 Apps"
http://www.crn.com/mobile/215801344
"Games represent 23.1 percent or 6,276 titles available."
So it is not clear a proprietary game would have any real commercial success
no matter how good in it. An open source effort might have a bigger chance
of being a huge success eventually. And if such game-like simulations were
linked to communities all making open content, even a game that was not very
popular, if it was open-source might advance open manufacturing and
post-scarcity issues. I might compromise to make a proprietary application
and be developing it all alone without the benefit of community feedback and
get nothing -- an unwanted application and no revenue.
There are no easy answers when we are both in a world and of a world where
competition and cooperation exist, and where a yin and yang duality
interacts to create variety and activity.
Even for the computer game route, then do I go it alone and write some small
games, or bring in partners and try to write bigger things or more things?
Or join a related group that looks promising in post-scarcity directions?
Personally, I'm happy with a few small things done mostly by myself. But, it
might be more fun to be part of some group or have a bigger outreach. The
proprietary route keeps you from sharing source except with those locked
into the same company, whereas open source projects have the potential for
fun collaborations in unexpected ways. Again, that's a big plus of the
non-profit open-source-from-the-start path. I'd rather do the non-profit
route, but it just seems unrealistic for my particular situation and past
experiences, at least, as an individual.
Anyway, mapping out the general landscape is part of figuring out where to
go and how to get there. Thanks for helping with that.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
ben lipkowitz
> If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
funny; i'd never heard that part of the quote. It's sort of
disappointing. Einstein's moral character was stronger than most, but I
bet we would have ended up with nuclear bombs anyway if he had never
existed.
"the best way to predict the future is to prevent it" doesn't really work
> For various reasons (losing a major client, and the general downturn) my
> wife is strongly "encouraging" me to earn money again after a rather long
> run of not worrying much about that. :-) So, I will have less time for doing
> more free stuff from here on in, unless I can come up with some other
> approach to support us.
> Changing how people think about scarcity and abundance would be very
> worth doing IMHO, and one way to do that would be through computer games
> and related content and software tools (which are easily abundant once
> developed). There are other ways as well (like various efforts on the
> P2PFoundation site), but that one I am best suited for with my computer
> software background.
I think computer games is a bad road to go down for supporting your
family. The "industry" (the dominant social clique that funds video games)
is notoriously hard to get into even to be heard, and especially for
"wussy" topics like, you know, saving the human race from self destruction
and all that.
There are three kinds of video games:
1) the hollywood mega blockbuster technology-envelope-expander (crysis etc)
2) the quirky "art" game genre-expander
3) the independent game
types 1 and 2 are the only ones that reliably make money, as they have
huge marketing and distribution companies behind them. typically type 3 is
done as a hobby which maybe barely generates enough income to support
itself, and occasionally (due to network effects) one of them will strike
oil, at which point the developer becomes a candidate for type 2 games.
Say it with me. Independent video games are not a way to make money.
> And by now, I've posted enough stuff on the internet to take me out of the
> mainstream, another difficulty, especially if I try to find consulting back
> in the corporate world. In that sense, just making a game to sell, or to get
> advertising revenues from, even if it fails to realize any income, is a more
> sure thing than chasing after either consulting or grants, in the sense that
> I am developing post-scarcity related content from day one instead of
> networking and fund-raising to perhaps no success.
You've had years to do this and it hasn't yet resulted in a finished
system. Why is that? Do you actually enjoy working on computer programs?
You seem to enjoy researching and writing long articles on various topics.
Have you seriously looked into journalism, or copy writing, or whatever
it's morphed into these days?
"Most copywriters are employees within organizations such as advertising
agencies, public relations firms, web developers, company advertising
departments, large stores, broadcasters and cable providers, newspapers
and magazines. Copywriters can also be independent contractors freelancing
for a variety of clients, at the clients' offices or working from home."
Of course if you try to work from home you'll be competing with
intelligent people in various countries around the world with much lower
payment expectations, but that's a problem with any telecommute jobs. One
segment of 'intelligence' work that is off-limits to outsourcing is things
which require a security clearance. ;) Your understanding of politics and
technology would probably fit well in that community. If you think you'll
be considered off-limits because you're a crazed leftist hippie, well,
look even Stewart Brand is doing it:
http://www.360.monitor.com/team_brand.html
I'd be surprised if there weren't a similar organization in New York.
HTH
-fenn
Emlyn
probably not a way to riches, indie games even more so, as Fenn said.
Software as a service might work better. ie: server based stuff.
If you want to make some money without losing your open source
sensibilities, think about models where your service is free for
regular people and open source use, but costs money for commercial
entities.
I'm not sure how this would go for games (how much do corporates
consume games?).
I was just thinking recently about a service providing simple build
automation for development projects (taking code from source
repositories, building it, running unit tests, deploying resulting
downloadable code to useful places). Slick web ui, easy configuration.
Business model would be, free if you are cool with everything being
open (ie: read access for anonymous), costs money for a closed
version. So, the people who want closed stuff effectively fund the
free stuff. Oh, the entire thing could be built out of open source,
hosted on Amazon's cloud infrastructure or similar. Any custom written
code for the service can be open sourced too.
There must be a lot more potential business models in that mould. Suck
money out of corporates to fund free stuff and incidentally yourself.
--
Emlyn
http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site
Paul D. Fernhout
Thanks for the comments. I've been poking around your site some more this
morning and there are a lot of great links and thoughts there.
Corporations do pay for games sometimes, considering how in round numbers
organizations might spent 10% of their budget on "training".
Examples:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=training+games
Here is a Dutch company that makes such computer simulation games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSTEP
"VSTEP was founded in 2002 by four experienced entrepreneurs. VSTEP
currently has 30 staff members as well as a network of subcontractors. Since
its founding, VSTEP has developed and completed over 30 simulation and
training projects, giving it a leading position in the European serious
games industry. In 2005, Fortis Venturing became a shareholder in VSTEP to
accelerate their growth in the serious games market.[1] On March 26, 2008,
the Dutch Ministry of Economics awarded VSTEP a prize for "Serious gaming
and simulation for a beter safety".[2] In 2008 Ship Simulator was nominated
for a Dutch Game Award in the category 'Best Serious Game'."
Example applications:
http://www.vstep.nl/projects/other_projects/detail.php
Here is another company (also Dutch) that makes such simulations:
http://www.tygron.nl/
"In daily life, the computer plays an important role. The current generation
spends a great amound of time on the internet and in virtual worlds. A part
of this is an growing niche, which we call ‘serious games’. This
computergames adds – besides the attracting part of gaming- a serious
message within a complicated simulation. In an active way, the players
experience the problematical case, and they will look for an solution in the
relative context. Insight in the perceptions of each other will come into
existance, and often there will become an growing understandig of the
interests of one another. Tygron specializes in bringing real-life complex
management challenges that have multiple actors with unique tasks and
different interests into a ‘multiplayer serious game’, making use of modern
game technology. To realize this concept, we work in a team of enthousiastic
game developers, and we cooperate with experienced partners wich have
specialized knowledge. The power of Tygron is to make a good translation of
the processes in reality to a game. Serious games are not 100% exact design
tools, but they will show the strategies (shortterm and longterm),
mechanisms, merits, problematical cases and actors in the way they are in
reality."
Why should those ideas not apply to learning about manufacturing?
Now, those two companies are not making the kind of casual games I was
talking about which might be funded by advertising or purchase. I'm thinking
(guessing) their business model is more to find a partner with a problem
(like the Port of Rotterdam considering how best to upgrade the port over
the next decade or two), and then they get a grant or contract and develop a
related educational simulation. For manufacturing, one might partner with a
major manufacturer, like, say, Toyota, to make a simulation about a factory
or supply chain network. These simulations may not exactly be "games" though
in how they are usually thought of. But they can be "hard fun" to play. They
are probably not open either if funded by companies, but that is not always
the case -- the OLPC was funded by companies and parts are open. So, for
someone with more social skills than I, putting together an open
manufacturing consortium that funds (open) educational simulations related
to manufacturing might be a viable proposition.
A non-profit example was "SimHealth":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimHealth
"SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation, released by Maxis in 1994,
is a management simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system produced with
assistance from the Markle Foundation. It was produced only for DOS, and is
difficult to locate on the market today,[citation needed] let alone play on
a modern operating system. The game was released during Congressional
debates on the Clinton health care plan."
That was one thing that prompted my letter to the Markle Foundation,
"On Funding Digital Public Works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
because they spent charitable dollars to help create a proprietary product,
and as a consequence, it is not available now. The charitable dollars were
not *entirely* wasted, because SimHealth contributed to the debate on health
care when it was released, but the charitable dollars were IMHO a lot less
effectively spent than they could have been had the results been free and
open source.
In general, yes, having some kind of service as a games server or other
system might be a possibility. In the OSCOMAK case, a server could provide,
say, free tools to analyze supply chains if your data was public, and maybe
you could have privacy for your corporate data if you paid.
I've also long thought about an online game related to sustainability, etc.,
with monthly subscription fees.
I like your suggestion as one other possible compromise. Still, at the core
of such services is usually a proprietary bit of software on the server. It
may even be built on GPL code libraries, but it is just never "distributed".
So, it is still a proprietary solution in that sense. Which means it shuts
down collaboration on the core code. With that said, it might be better to
have such a system where the content was open (or at least about opening
society) but the core was proprietary, than to not have such a system at
all. One can debate that perhaps, maybe it isn't worth it.
One can create open standards for exchanging information while competing on
implementing those standards. It's not ideal in my mind compared to having
both open standards and open implementations, but it is a practice that,
say, IBM often follows these days. I worked on one such project there, to
implement XML-FO, where several companies had their own proprietary
implementations of that standard that was being developed jointly as an open
standard (and there were some open implementations too). There is a lot to
be said for open standards.
The biggest problem with, say, MSWord is actually not that the program is
proprietary; it is that the data formats are proprietary (although they have
been reverse engineered at great trouble in OpenOffice). It's a lot easier
to replace a proprietary core that to replace a lot of content in
proprietary formats. Still, on open standard only goes so far, since, as
Alan Kay says, any "standard" with more than three lines is ambiguous. :-)
So, open reference implementations are still the best standards.
Thanks again for your perspective.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> On Thu, 21 May 2009, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>
>> If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
>
> funny; i'd never heard that part of the quote. It's sort of
> disappointing. Einstein's moral character was stronger than most, but I
> bet we would have ended up with nuclear bombs anyway if he had never
> existed.
I agree; I'm sure we would have. I don't know how that watchmaker part was
meant, as a joke or seriously.
> I think computer games is a bad road to go down for supporting your
> family. The "industry" (the dominant social clique that funds video games)
> is notoriously hard to get into even to be heard, and especially for
> "wussy" topics like, you know, saving the human race from self destruction
> and all that.
>
> There are three kinds of video games:
> 1) the hollywood mega blockbuster technology-envelope-expander (crysis etc)
> 2) the quirky "art" game genre-expander
> 3) the independent game
>
> types 1 and 2 are the only ones that reliably make money, as they have
> huge marketing and distribution companies behind them. typically type 3 is
> done as a hobby which maybe barely generates enough income to support
> itself, and occasionally (due to network effects) one of them will strike
> oil, at which point the developer becomes a candidate for type 2 games.
>
> Say it with me. Independent video games are not a way to make money.
Well, that certainly seems like an accurate overview of the situation. :-)
It is a risky proposition, but, unfortunately, so are alternatives. :-)
Some risks feel more comfortable to different people, depending on past
experiences and skills. For me, climbing a mountain with gear would be very
risky, but for an experienced climber, they would have fun at it with
minimal risk. Likewise, risks for me may be lower writing games than for
some others writing games with less programming and design experience.
The risk of doing a great game is it doesn't make money; the risk of
pursuing grants is that it both doesn't make money and results in no content
or code. But with that said, if I viewed grant seeking as about *educating*
foundations about social trends and what they should be supporting, then an
effort for fund raising might succeed at something, even if it fails to
raise money. :-)
And, there is always the "imp" of the impossible. :-)
As I mentioned in my reply to Emlyn, there are some companies that make good
money creating training simulations (including about manufacturing related
issues, at least if you count construction as manufacturing).
http://www.vstep.nl
http://www.tygron.nl
In theory, one might imagine such simulations about learning to manufacture
better. Ideally they would be open, but even if they were proprietary, they
would be inspiration to be copied. And it is ten times or even a hundred
times harder to write new software than to remake the same thing once you've
seen the original in action, because you can skip all the misteps you don't
see related to long design discussion, thrown away complexity, etc. So, even
proprietary simulations can advance the state of the art. Not ideal, but it
may help.
On revenue, one tricky thing about the new "free" economy is that it is
often possible to make money if you are really small and frugal (where $5K a
month is a great revenue for a family to live on) or really big (where you
dominate the playing field and have vast amounts of capital to try over and
over again and to advertise or otherwise create brand awareness). It is the
middle ground that is often hardest to be in. That point is made in some
comments here:
""Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs"
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/-free-is-killing-us-blame-the-vcs
A follow up: :-)
"Don't Just Blame The VCs For 'Free': Google's Killing Us, Too"
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/don-t-just-blame-the-vcs-for-free-google-s-killing-us-too
So, it depends who the "us" is being talked about being killed by "free".
Maybe no other smaller dinosaur can survive an attack by a T-Rex or Google
on their business, but tiny individual shrews on the ground happy with a few
seeds here and there may still be making a small living and surviving in
small niches beneath the notice of T-Rex/Google (unless accidentally stepped
on. :-)
With that said, making a proprietary game is not at all my first choice. I'd
rather make stuff that was open. And I agree there are big risks in a
crowded market that are very different when I wrote one of the first machine
language games for the Commodore VIC close to thirty years ago. On the other
hand, if all you got is a programming hammer, every problem looks like a
video game. :-)
But in general, one can ask, will it get harder or easier to make money from
game-related sales or advertising as time goes by? The answer seems it will
get harder as more and more people do it. So, it is a crowded market and
getting more crowded. And more and more games will be written all over the
planet, where a $1000 a month revenue stream may feel like a fortune. So,
even more competition. This may actually be the last moment to do something
like that, if it is not tool late already, as you suggest.
>> And by now, I've posted enough stuff on the internet to take me out of the
>> mainstream, another difficulty, especially if I try to find consulting back
>> in the corporate world. In that sense, just making a game to sell, or to get
>> advertising revenues from, even if it fails to realize any income, is a more
>> sure thing than chasing after either consulting or grants, in the sense that
>> I am developing post-scarcity related content from day one instead of
>> networking and fund-raising to perhaps no success.
>
> You've had years to do this and it hasn't yet resulted in a finished
> system. Why is that? Do you actually enjoy working on computer programs?
Those are good questions. Thanks for asking them.
I don't have great answers.
I have to admit, after programming for almost thirty years (starting as a
teenager), it is not as exciting as it used to be for its own sake. :-)
And having used (the proprietary) Visual Works Smalltalk with ENVY,
everything else is just awful to work in, by comparison. :-) Java in Eclipse
even now is still behind what it could do ten years ago, but at least Java
is open now.
I think had I been pursuing OSCOMAK etc. in some face-to-face supportive
social context around a few other people ten years ago, it would have gotten
a lot further. I tried to pursue it around four different university
graduate programs in the 1980s (CMU Robotics & Computer Science as a
visitor, North Carolina State Industrial Engineering as a PhD, Princeton
Civil Engineering and Operations Research as a PhD, and SUNY Stony Brook
Ecology and Evolution as a PhD), and had it not work out every time for
various reasons. I now see it was a mistake then to think universities would
be helpful.
I had not understood then the "Disciplined Minds" issue. There are
exceptions. Prof. Larry Leifer was one person I met long ago at a
space-telerobotics conference and talked about on these themes later (and
his grad students all spoke very highly of him), but his group at Stanford
in the 1980s seemed an impossible dream for a few reasons (including my own
impatience at the time being daunted by a long admissions process at
Stanford, seeeming so far away from East Coast roots and with a long list of
departmental prerequisites for a Psychology major to switch to engineering):
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~leifer/
His group later became the Center For Design Research it seems:
http://me.stanford.edu/research/centers/cdr/index.html
"The Stanford Center for Design Research is a community of scholars focused
on understanding and augmenting engineering design innovation and design
education. We are dedicated to facilitating individual creativity,
understanding the team design process, and developing advanced tools and
methods that promote superior design and manufacturing of products."
Stanford's CDR is one of the academic groups that should be doing open
manufacturing research. I wonder how much of the stuff coming out of there
now is open as opposed to proprietary? I just looked that group up now, so I
don't know what it is up to in detail.
One big stumbling block has been the scope of the problem (which entails
community to solve it). Of course now, twenty years later it is easier to do
things collaboratively over the internet, but I also have other
preoccupations in my forties (family etc.).
Another big concern I've had is the likelihood that, pursuing a community
solution, a broad ranging database is eventually going to get some kid to
put something like the Anarchist's Cookbook in it, which will create a host
of issues (censorship issues, inaccurate information, dangerous information,
copyrighted information, etc.). While annoying, the continuous spam to the
OSCOMAK wiki was not such a big worry as what could have happened. That
concern has driven a lot of my interest in the social semantic desktop work,
where individuals can take more responsibility for their content and what
they share or host. But, that means a different paradigm, another set back.
While you see my writing on this list, I tend to alternate moods of writing
and programming. For example, the last month I finished porting StoryHarp
choose-your-own-adventure creator from Delphi to Java.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/StoryHarp/screens.htm
I did this in part because once I hand the Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop
infrastructure working to my satisfaction as a base,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
I felt I needed to let that sit for a time to get some perspective on it,
and also I wanted to get back up to speed complete writing desktop apps. The
StoryHarp software has all the basics of undo and redo while editing a
complex network (which can be imagined as a network of industrial processes
instead of a network of utterances. :-) So, I saw it as as step forward.
(I'm conflicted how to release that actual StoryHarp Java code at the
moment, as FOSS vs. some other approach like try to sell it for a time as an
easy way to make iPhone or JavaScript games, and then open it. A year or two
ago, I would have just put it up open source for sure, rather than pause for
a moment on it.)
Before that it was a lot of work on the Pointrel infrastructure. Before
that, a lot of work on other stuff like PataPata. So, infrastructure work,
and work that seemed more approachable. And then I see others doing great
stuff, and wonder, how much should I push my own stuff forward? Am I
disappointed at the results of my work? Sure, I do very much wish I had more
to show for that time. But, learning is important too. I learned a lot.
That's something. I wrote up some of that learning to share it.
> You seem to enjoy researching and writing long articles on various topics.
> Have you seriously looked into journalism, or copy writing, or whatever
> it's morphed into these days?
Well, I did get an "A" in a science-writing seminar I took at Princeton from
John Noble Wilford. But I think he was an easy grader. :-)
I've never taken a real programming course. I taught some though. :-)
> "Most copywriters are employees within organizations such as advertising
> agencies, public relations firms, web developers, company advertising
> departments, large stores, broadcasters and cable providers, newspapers
> and magazines. Copywriters can also be independent contractors freelancing
> for a variety of clients, at the clients' offices or working from home."
If what I mainly liked to do was write, I agree that these are all good
things to do, even if journalism is never-that-profitable career colliding
with the internet of free content. The book "Honk if You're a Writer" makes
that point, that writers can get all sorts of jobs where they make people's
lives better through writing.
The problem is more, I like to write about what *I* like to write about,
which is these post-scarcity themes. :-) Same for programming. But I doubt I
could maintain energy writing about most things. Programming is a rarer
skill, and I'm better at it relative to writing (where there are many
writers much better than me), so as a career, writing never made much sense.
Even as a lackluster unmotivated programmer slinging generic code in a
Dilbert setting, I'd still be better than average (and fortunately I've been
on more interesting contracts than the worst case, like at IBM Research). I
probably could not say that about writing.
I certainly could rework stuff I have written into a book about open
manufacturing or related topics. But most books never earn beyond a $5K are
$10K advance, especially if you don't want to travel to promote them.
Writing books for most people is just a career booster. Nice, but not
profitable, as you said above for most games. Also, would I really improve
on stuff like "Here comes everybody" and so on? Anyway, given I've put most
of what I have to say up for free, the only way to make much money from it
would be to get a publisher involved, and their contracts are usually awful.
What you really get from a publisher of any value is the money they devote
to advertising your book, but again, you have to go on tour for that to
work, and I'm a stay-at-home dad (sharing that responsibility with my wife).
> Of course if you try to work from home you'll be competing with
> intelligent people in various countries around the world with much lower
> payment expectations, but that's a problem with any telecommute jobs.
Absolutely true. Which brings up the "Better than Free" sorts of issues in a
recent post.
> One
> segment of 'intelligence' work that is off-limits to outsourcing is things
> which require a security clearance. ;)
Well, not all that kind of work does. :-) But you're right, a US American
with a security clearance is in a good position to keep a job these days.
> Your understanding of politics and
> technology would probably fit well in that community.
Perhaps. :-) But there is going to be an internal split in that community,
between defending the status quo versus trying to survive or guide its
collapse. Some of my previous writing was with an eye to that split.
I still feel what I wrote here is too edgy for that entire community at the
moment, maybe not in five or ten years or so: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
What am I up to with that PU education myself? Besides being a part-time
stay-at-home Dad, I'm busy these days in my "free" time (along with many in
the world, such as these people: http://www.reprap.org/ :-) attempting to
help take down the intellectual scaffolding of global capitalism one myth at
a time in a controlled safe manner where no one gets hurt, same as these
people do when demolishing physical structures past their usefulness:
http://www.controlled-demolition.com/
"And behind each successful project stands the CDI team - a talented
group of professionals with decades of experience dedicated to absolute
perfection on each new project."
See, there are people whose whole careers are devoted to the safe demolition
of historic structures. And this essay is not intended in any way to defend
anyone who intentionally destroys structures in a way intended to hurt people.
"""
So, Open Manufacturing in a sense is already my day job; I just don't get
paid for it. :-)
Maybe what I need is a paying hobby on the side, like carpentry or "manager
of robots". :-)
Or, some way of bringing together charitable and/or corporate dollars to
make that unpaid day job into right livelihood?
> If you think you'll
> be considered off-limits because you're a crazed leftist hippie, well,
> look even Stewart Brand is doing it:
> http://www.360.monitor.com/team_brand.html
Thanks for the great example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
I've loved his work; I should reflect more on his career.
And also reflect on the quote from him in the Wikipedia article:
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute,
copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because
it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go
away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright,
'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because
each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
> I'd be surprised if there weren't a similar organization in New York.
Actually, my wife does some of that sort of thing, advising organizations
(about narrative and complexity in her case), as the more respectable of us
two at this point. :-) Actually, she mostly advises the advisers. :-)
But, due no doubt in part to my bad influence, she wants to do more free
stuff. :-) From her new project:
http://www.rakontu.org/
"We are building a free and open source software package called Rakontu
("tell a story" in Esperanto) to help communities (and organizations,
groups, families) share and work with raw stories of personal experience for
mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support."
So, my current difficulty is in part due to my very success. :-) It's only
fair she gets to do more free stuff and I figure out a way to bring in some
money though.
It's been a nice ride not worrying too much about money for years, watching
our child grow as a stay-at-home Dad. Of course, if we were willing to
sacrifice our child's soul on the altar of schooling (rather than
homeschool), we'd both have a lot more free time. Which is one reason there
remains such a high demand for "teaching" in schools, because it is also
babysitting as parents can then do other things. But, we don't want to make
that kind of sacrifice. Actually, whether homeschooling parents can
ethically be teachers in schools is itself another quagmire of ethical
issues. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Emlyn
> (I'm conflicted how to release that actual StoryHarp Java code at the
> moment, as FOSS vs. some other approach like try to sell it for a time as an
> easy way to make iPhone or JavaScript games, and then open it. A year or two
> ago, I would have just put it up open source for sure, rather than pause for
> a moment on it.)
Do both, they don't conflict. Make it free, and sell it as an iPhone
app. People that buy iPhone apps clearly have more money than sense
:-) But seriously, is there a realistic scenario where people eschew
something in an app store to instead try and get the free thing
compiled and onto their phone?
Emlyn
> I like your suggestion as one other possible compromise. Still, at the core
> of such services is usually a proprietary bit of software on the server. It
> may even be built on GPL code libraries, but it is just never "distributed".
> So, it is still a proprietary solution in that sense. Which means it shuts
> down collaboration on the core code. With that said, it might be better to
> have such a system where the content was open (or at least about opening
> society) but the core was proprietary, than to not have such a system at
> all. One can debate that perhaps, maybe it isn't worth it.
>
While I agree that this is often the case, it is in no way necessary.
You can set up a service based entirely on free software, freely
releasing everything custom, and still have a business.
The key here is service. Sure, someone can set up their own servers
and so on and doesn't need your service in a lock-in sense, but then
they have work to do. If they go with you, they just have to click a
few buttons and they're away. They're not buying access to unique
software, they're buying convenience, plus access to experts who are
competent to admin the software, someone else to deal with backups and
security and etc etc. Plus, if you've done it right, they're buying in
to community.
If you look at it in that light, being fully open is a benefit. For a
startup service provider, one negative is that you have no reputation;
you have to reassure people somehow that you wont go bust and take all
their data with you, trapped in your proprietary system. With a
service company built on open software, you simply provide
import/export functionality, and make sure people know they can run
stuff themselves (give them step by step instructions!).
Patrick Anderson
<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> I like your suggestion as one other possible compromise. Still, at the core
> of such services is usually a proprietary bit of software on the server. It
> may even be built on GPL code libraries, but it is just never "distributed".
> So, it is still a proprietary solution in that sense.
Maybe this is obvious, but I'll point out that this scenario is the
primary purpose of the GNU AGPL.
Copyright holders hoping to ensure freedom should use the GNU AGPL for
*all* Copyrightable works, even if they seem to not need such coverage
because of how the network will be delivering the 'display' of such
things in the future without ever transferring the Objects themselves.
I think there is already a new game service that does this - or is
soon to come online - where the software is executed on the remote
server and the user receives only a video stream.
Paul D. Fernhout
use AGPL code in GPL works, and vice versa? Now that I look at it, it looks
like there is some exception in version 3 for some compatability:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
"""
GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3
This is a free software, copyleft license. Its terms effectively
consist of the terms of GPLv3, with an additional paragraph in section 13 to
allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to
receive the source for that program. We recommend that developers consider
using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network.
Please note that the GNU AGPL is not compatible with GPLv2. It is also
technically not compatible with GPLv3 in a strict sense: you cannot take
code released under the GNU AGPL and convey or modify it however you like
under the terms of GPLv3, or vice versa. However, you are allowed to combine
separate modules or source files released under both of those licenses in a
single project, which will provide many programmers with all the permission
they need to make the programs they want. See section 13 of both licenses
for details.
"""
Contrast that with:
"Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else."
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html
"This essay argues that developers of Free-libre / open source software
(FLOSS, aka OSS/FS) should use an existing widely-used license compatible
with the General Public License (GPL), particularly the GPL, LGPL, MIT/X, or
BSD-new licenses. It also argues against FLOSS license proliferation; where
possible, you should only select FLOSS licenses from that list (with the
possible addition of Apache 2.0). This article was previously printed, with
a number of changes, as an article at OsOpinion."
Such a mess, with multiple versions even of just the GPL with various
incompatibilities.
Actually, that is why I'm leaning more towards the LGPL for projects these
days as the main license, as the LGPL in essentially compatible with
everything open source but is still copyleft within the main project itself.
Though it doesn't cover the issue you raise (or others).
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> 2009/5/23 Paul D. Fernhout <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>:
>> (I'm conflicted how to release that actual StoryHarp Java code at the
>> moment, as FOSS vs. some other approach like try to sell it for a time as an
>> easy way to make iPhone or JavaScript games, and then open it. A year or two
>> ago, I would have just put it up open source for sure, rather than pause for
>> a moment on it.)
>
> Do both, they don't conflict. Make it free, and sell it as an iPhone
> app. People that buy iPhone apps clearly have more money than sense
> :-) But seriously, is there a realistic scenario where people eschew
> something in an app store to instead try and get the free thing
> compiled and onto their phone?
Good point. :-) That gets back to "Better than Free" essay
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
-- you are suggesting to be open but sell something like convenience or
authenticity. There are also reasons to buy something through the Apple
store from an official vendor rather than download it from a random place on
the net, since getting the product from more official distributors makes it
less likely it has spyware or something else nasty, and it also makes it
more likely the application is up-to-date.
Plus the purchaser is acting as a patron of the application developer,
another "Better than Free" benefit.
For some science behind that idea of patronage:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/want-to-be-happy-give-your-money-away-799015.html
"In a study that helps explain a paradox of modern life – why increasing
wealth does not necessarily make people happier – psychologists found how
people spend their money is at least as important as how much of it they
earn in the first place. The greatest joys of all, they discovered, can be
attained by giving money away, either to someone they know or to charity.
... Provided there is enough money for basic needs, there appears to be
little evidence to suggest that greater wealth makes people any happier,
said Professor Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver. "Indeed, although real incomes have surged dramatically in recent
decades, happiness levels have remained largely flat within developed
countries across time," Professor Dunn said. "One of the most intriguing
explanations for this counter-intuitive finding is that people often pour
their increased wealth into pursuits that provide little in the way of
lasting happiness, such as purchasing costly consumer goods." ... In a final
experiment, the scientists gave 46 student volunteers an envelope containing
either $5 (£2.50) or $20, telling them to spend their money by 5pm either on
themselves or on other people. Those who were asked to spend their windfall
on others said that they felt happier at the end of the day than those who
had to spend the money on themselves. "These findings suggest that very
minor alterations in spending allocations – as little as $5 – may be enough
to produce real gains in happiness on a given day," Professor Dunn said."
So, that suggests developers should also make it clear somehow that the
money is like a gift to the developer rather than the person spending money
on themselves, if the software is open. Except, most people probably still
believe in the myth they will get more happiness by spending $5 on
themselves than giving it as a gift? So, maybe explain this on the developer
site too? :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
Emlyn-
Thanks for another great point outlining a server-based business strategy to
support openness.
In my wife's case with Rakontu (story-based communities), she is working on
a Google App Engine product (I see on your blog you mentioned an interest in
App engine too). She is releasing the software under the GPL as it is developed:
http://code.google.com/p/rakontu/
While there are several reasons she is doing that project, one is in hopes
it will increase her visibility as a consultant working in that area (where
she supplies related consulting services for setting up such communities or
helping the communities figure out what their own stories might mean to them
considered together on a bigger picture level).
So, in that sense, the source code is serving somewhat the same purpose in
terms of advertising as if she were to write a widely circulated book on the
topic. Actually, she already wrote a free book, too, so an application is a
next step. :-) That free book (a case where a CC non-commercial license
seemed appropriate.)
"Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization"
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
Many companies spend vast amounts of money advertising, so advertising is a
very recognized business function that justifies huge amounts of spending in
many organizations. For example, car companies and drug companies and some
software companies spend tons of money on advertising, often *much* more
than on research and development. A funny video on that:
"Apple "Get a Mac" ad: Bean Counter"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MimCZikP8cY
By the way for open source balance, a Linux vs. Mac vs. PC ad: :-)
"Second Novell Linux Spoof Ad"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVOnFdMf0RU
My wife has also been thinking about whether she wants to run a paid hosting
service with guaranteed uptime etc., but has not decided on that. She might
also offer some free hosting within the free App Engine limits on a
non-guaranteed basis. A guarantee is another thing that makes something
"better than free":
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
So is "scalability" perhaps.
It is true that while there are business opportunities around servers, they
often entail, as you suggest, system administration type work, not
development work or consulting work. So, if one has a choice of how one
wants to make money, depending on one's interests and inclinations, running
a hosting service might not be the best fit for a developer or consultant.
Again, it might be an OK fit, and better than other options, and might fit
well in with those other roles for some variety, but doing backups is still
not the same as developing. Of course, some people with some personalities
are just great as system administration work and love it and thrive on the
sense of continual responsibility and being needed that being on call 24X7
entails. :-) But the same kind of personalities may not make the best
developers and vice versa.
I really like your point about reputation and reassurance with an open system.
In the case of even App Engine, which is supported by Google, it was the
prospect that there were already clones that supported most or all of the
App Engine functionality in open source ways that made it seem reasonable to
try the platform. (A lot of it is Django-like, so that's a ready option for
migration if desired as well.) So, her own decision on that echoes your
point, even for *big* companies making new things these days, that openness
encourages people to try something new with a feeling of less risk for
future migration.
Just to bring that into a manufacturing context, with a twist related to
companies with huge reputations, there have been people asking, who would
buy a US American car if they know the car company is going into bankruptcy?
There is a risk that you won't be able to get parts or information for
servicing. An open automotive design might help alleviate some of that fear
perhaps. :-) Although there is still the risk of warranties not honored. :-(
Thanks again to you and fenn for all the great suggestions and feedback.
--Paul Fernhout