Go Open
Do and share what you love, while still getting paid.
Story
What is Going Open?
Going Open, imples adopting the principles of the Open Movement, which is a blanket term that covers:
In the end it means you make everything available to the world freely and publicly, and earn your money via crowd-funding.
Why do we need this campaign?
It turns out, that while the open-source industry is well acquianted with the open movement, outside of that tiny little bubble the rest of the world is not, and in some cases, have even been exposed to a lot of FUD about it by closed-sourced companies.
This campaign aims to rectify common misconceptions about the open movement as well as the goal to bring it to the masses.
What are the benefits of going open?
- Infinitely and Instantly Scalable Team
- Closed teams generally just focus on the roadmap, which doesn't cover the little things; Whereas open teams, opens you up to pull-requests that cover all sorts of small things (add reference)
- You sell your Brand, not your Products
- Information was made to be free, and is fundamentally organic, you're not meant to own it
- When I say "hello", I don't lose it like psyhical property, instead it is copied into your brain
- Reference Tim Beners Lee talking about the Open Data Movement, "you wouldn't believe the amount of execuses people come up with to keep their information closed"
- If someone "steals" your product, you are still fine
- Information was made to be free, and is fundamentally organic, you're not meant to own it
- There is no competition, only collaboration
- It's still okay to sell tickets to trainings and events, just make them open afterwards!
- This will make sure the costs of paying for the venue are covered by those extra enthusiastic wanting to receive more value by being there
- And those who can't afford the trainings (the majority of the world) or those who couldn't attent for whatever reason, and those who did attend, can reference the recording at their own time
- You can even earn revenue each view by utilising YouTube Monetization, Sponsorship, and other initiatives (more on this later)
What happens if I don't go open?
Have you ever feared what would happen if a superior competitor stole all of your work and started packaging into together into a superior bundle? Or if you have a ground breaking idea, release it in your product, then have people reverse engineer clones of it all the time without crediting you? Pretty scary right?
Turns out both of those problems can be solved by going open. By going open:
- You transition from selling your work, to your brand, so it doesn't matter if your work gets stolen or redistributed, you still earn money as people believe in and donate to your brand instead
- Instead of people stealing or cloning your work, you have people collaborating on it, and giving you back credit where credit is due
- As more people collaborate on it, the more work you get done without doing it yourself, and the more your work grows!
- The more you go open, the more content you have out there, the more content you have out there, the more exposure you have, the more exposure you have, the quicker your business grows
Who's already doing this?
How do I go open?
- Make everything available for free
- Choose a permissive license that indicate your intentions
- Creative Commons for creative works
- MIT for software
- Public Domain for everything
- Earn revenue from your brand, not your products
- See the "How do I earn money?" section
- Use open communication tools to facilitate collaboration
- GitHub for source hosting, discussions, and wikis
- Google Hangouts On Air for meetings
How do I get paid?
Traditionally, we earned our money to do what we love by:
- Creative a closed work (that isn't what we love)
- Sell the closed work (that isn't what we love)
- Use the proceeds to do what we love
With going open, instead we:
- Do what we love
- Inspires others to donate to us
- Use the proceeds to do what we love
In order to do this, the following services are available at our diposal:
Everyone can use these to raise money for new projects and ideas that can change the world, or if you have an existing closed-source work you can use these to raise enough money to guarantee going open is feasible for you:
- Once-Off Pre-Orders
Creatives (musicians, authors, artists) can use use these to raise money for their next works:
- Recurrant Pre-Order
Everyone can use these to accept money from those they've inspired:
Everyone may be able to use these:
- Alternative Models
- Sponsorship Contracts
- @TODO: Provide open-source contracts they can use
- Public Domain Advisory Services over Google Hangouts On Air
- @TODO: Provide open-source contracts they can use
- Ticket sales to In-Person Trainings and Events (that then get released to Youtube for free, earning additional revenue through Youtube advertising)
- Advertising
- Referrals
- Ubuntu Dash, Firefox Search
- Affiliate Recomendations
- Sponsorship Contracts
Typical Transition Path
Open-sourcing everything while still earning a full time income may seem like a difficult prospect. Here is what the usual transition path looks like:
- Get Gittip and Flattr accounts
- Use this to receive donations from people who believe in you
- Get a Paypal Donate Button
- Use this to receive one-off donations from people who believe in you
- Get a BountySource or Patreon account
- Use this to receive pre-orders of new requests, features, courses, trainings, whatever
- Get an Adsense Account and turn on Monetization on Youtube
- Use this to place advertising on your website/blog, as well on your Youtube (and Google Hangout on Air) videos
- Create a Sponsorship Contract
- Use this to receive large (100+) donations from known people who believe in you
- Release all your works under one of the permissive licences
- Use this to provide your work to others, while allowing your brand to grow as your work is spread and remixed
- Dependeing on your circumstances, you could even run a Once-Off Pre-Order Campaign (think Kickstarter) to say "If we raise $XXX we will open-source everything!" to help raise awareness, gather feedback, and hopefully enough money to remove the doubts
- Provide free Google Hangouts on Air
- Use this to provide your advice to others, while allowing your brand to grow as you do so
- Provide paid Consulting Services
- Use this to pay the bills until the more passive income streams have fulfilled, as well as for traditional clients
Follow Up Learning
- Presentation: Benjamin Lupton: Open-Source will leave you behind
- In the end, the decision to go open-source or not, is how difficult do you want to make the reverse engineering process? Going closed means very difficult and no attribution for you, going open means very easy and attribution to you.
- Ted Talk: Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking
- We raised $1.192 million dollars by giving our music away for free... instead of forcing people to pay us money, we let them.
- Hangout on Air: CentUp, Flattr, Gittip, Patreon - Sustainable Crowdfunding
- Discussion between and about the different crowd-funding services
Contribute
- To update content, send pull requests on the README.md file
- To submit designs, to discuss, and to view the Todo List, checkout out the Issue Tracker
License
Unless stated otherwise; all works are Copyright © 2013+ Bevry Pty Ltd [email protected] and licensed permissively under the MIT License for code and the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License for everything else (including content, media and design), enjoy!
Contributors: