Making Open Source Truly Open

2 points by mansooratsemut 3 years ago | 4 comments

Current Open Source model is not sustainable and prevents Open Source from being what it is truly capable of. Open Source needs to be a true grassroots movements that it was originally conceived to be. We at Semut have been building technologies to transform Open Source and help it grow by several times.

Semut enables not-for-profit organisations like Apache Software Foundation to offer managed services for Apache projects with minimal effort. This enables Apache Software Foundation to be much larger than several tech unicorns in terms of revenue. Simultaneously, Semut enables developers to contribute to open source projects full-time without worrying about a pay check.

A developer can build a managed service using Semut in matter of weeks instead of months or years it would otherwise take.

We are thrilled to show what we have building and see how our technologies will get used. Developers can signup for an early preview on https://semut.io.

gus_massa 3 years ago |

From https://semut.io/making-open-source-truly-open.html

> Consider an example of a company with 10,000 employees. If the company uses Slack for $10 per user per month, the company would be shelling out $1.2 Million annually. In theory, the company can use Mattermost (An open source alternative for Slack) and save $1.2 Million annually.

> However, to deploy Mattermost and ensure 24/7 availability, the company will need at least a small team of devops engineers available on call round the clock. The overall cost including the cost of recruiting, replacing and managing combined with various other ancillary costs makes self hosting Mattermost as expensive as a commercial SAAS offering.

I agree, but is your service going to cost less than $10 per user per month? How much do you get? How is the rest split between the contributors of the project?

mansooratsemut 3 years ago | |

We anticipate it to be significantly less than $10 per month. The final cost would depend on various factors. Primary factors being the price of the service (which will be set by the developers of the service) and size of the deployment (larger deployments will have significantly lower cost per user).

How will the money be split amongst the contributors will need to be determined by the community itself. The community (we assume the community to be a not-for-profit registered company) could employ engineers full-time and/or build a framework which will assign a dollar value to every contribution based on factors like quality, complexity, quantum, etc. Semut does not play a role in this. We enable open source projects to be available as a service with minimal engineering effort and enable monetisation of the service (while the code remains open source).

precompute 3 years ago |

It's not very clear what your organization wants to accomplish, or how it wants to go about achieving it.

https://semut.io/making-open-source-truly-open.html Makes it sounds like a consultancy of sorts.

mansooratsemut 3 years ago | |

Thank you for your feedback. We agree that our initial post may have been vague on the specifics of our solutions, but we are excited to share more about Semut's technologies and how they can help achieve our vision for Open Source. We will be writing a separate post on Semut's technologies and how they help achieve the vision and solve the problems. Here's a sneak peak on one of our solutions -

Semut is a simple language agnostic framework for rapid development of managed services. Open Source communities can make their applications available as a service by default so that anyone (not just the engineers) can use the applications in one click. We find it baffling that many open source applications (like CRM, ERP, LMS, etc) built for businesses and non technical users exclude them as they cannot make use of the code. They'll need engineers again to make use of Open Source software. That is a very big problem that needs to be addressed. By making applications available as an easy to use service, the community will be making their applications usable by everyone. Managed services built using Semut will be comparable to commercial PAAS and SAAS solutions.

There is more to Semut's technologies. We'll be talking about them in detail soon. Meanwhile, developers can signup for an early preview and see Semut in action. Here is the link for signing up - https://semut.io/#sec55