Public alpha also launched today. In addition to reading/commenting on whitepaper, developers can run Storj V3 and view public roadmap and public Jira. Contributing now significantly easier at https://github.com/storj/storj
"Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks." Truth.
Cloud computing is becoming the dominant model, and
the current combination of OSS licenses and public cloud players/incentives make it nearly impossible for OSS companies to monetize in the cloud. While there are no perfect answers, we either need to come up with new licenses (difficult) or pursue a new approach to cloud (decentralization) that supports OSS monetization.
The umbrella issue is monetization of software. Perhaps the philosophy of OSS as a monetization strategy is fatally flawed for certain types of software. I love OSS and it is very useful, but in the world we see that some things are better suited for selling online (not usually pet food), etc. Perhaps it is simply an issue of a particular problem that cannot be well solved by OSS. If that is the case, then perhaps we fall back to the idea of "software monetization" and go proprietary for certain things which work best that way, while pushing OSS for things where it works very well.
To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.
Truth be told, to me those are not very meaningful, as those companies operate on a scale, and have requirements that are on another planet from mine. Is Docker useful for people/organizations that are not so large? The other responses seem to think so!
