Open Source Business Model

Development
1

[Not sure if this should go in Development or Projects or somewhere else]

First of all I just found out about maidsafe yesterday and I took my night and read a lot of stuff. Now I have not read anywhere near all the documentation and I skimmed a lot of it because I was very excited about the possibilities a system/protocol/network like this could/should mean to the world, so I could have totally missed the answer to this.

On the developer page it says the following:

By introducing the SAFE networks very own crypto currency, safecoin, developers now finally have an Open Source business model that works. By coding your safe wallet ID into your application(s), the network will automatically pay safecoins to you based on how much the application is utilised by end users. No longer will app developers need to morph themselves into support experts or advertising resellers, you can now focus on making great applications with a revenue stream already built in.

My question is do these apps just generate new safecoins as people use the software or are these safecoins taken from the app users wallet and passed to the dev(s) of the app. If it’s the former what would be needed to stop someone from building some crap app and starting up a bunch of vms that would just run it all day and get more coins? If it’s the later we will need to make sure there is a solid solution so people don’t just accidently get coins taken from them (ie some type of malicious malware app that runs in the backgroud etc.)

I was working on a little proof of concept a while back that I called BuildItHub. It would be a way for devs to get a stake in oss projects based on the amount of effort they put into building the app. This would be done by the current devs voting on how much effort each feature took. I can write more about it later. Could we do something like this with apps so devs could get their “fair” share of what the app is producing?

I want to get involved and thank you for putting together this forum.

1 Like
2

It is this…

…and I’m sure there are plans to prevent an app taking coins without authorisation from the user, though I am not aware of how this might be managed. Its a good question though, and worthy of discussion.

It would be good to have some standard charging models that developers can adopt and are easy for users to understand and manage, but it would also be good to allow developers freedom to set their own.

This might be regulated just as in the normal way - through app store ratings and feedback - and through limits that protect a user’s wallet. For example, a threshold above which the user must explicitly authorise: any single payment, the total amount taken by an app in one day, week, month and so on. Permissions would be signed by the user and adjustable/revokable at any time, though retrospective changes (i.e. refunds) would require authorisation by the app developer of course.

Anyway, welcome @chadrickm and please get stuck in and share your ideas about BuildItHub - maybe in the Projects section? It’s a great project and a great community, and a very exciting time to be part of it I’ll tell you - and if you fancy investing in SafeCoin you can probably still buy at a good rate even though you missed the crowd sale which ended one month ago in record time. And that, is another story! :slight_smile: