Underwriting the cost of development

Steve Song’s entry into the world of affordable internet access dates back to the early 1990s, when he helped run WorkNet, an email network and bulletin board for the labour movement in South Africa. He later founded Village Telco, a social enterprise manufacturing low-cost Wi-Fi mesh VoIP technologies to help marginalised communities get online. Among other things, he is currently a policy advisor to Mozilla, and works on policy and regulation issues for the Local Networks (LocNet) community-centred connectivity initiative run by APC and Rhizomatica. 

He was interviewed by Xavier Coadic. They spoke about what it was like to launch an ISP in the 1990s, undersea cables, low Earth orbit satellites, last-mile access and FLOSS. The full interview can be downloaded at: https://media.apc.org/w/p/hvSrvn6rTr1dYgL8875EiF

[In community-centred connectivity] there are pros and cons to the use of open source tools and technologies that play out differently in different parts of the problem. Obviously, the advantage of open source software is that the entry barrier is very low, because you can simply download the software and there is no cost. Often the most active open source software tools also have thriving communities, and those are excellent, especially open source projects that are quite mature. But I'm conscious of the fact that, sometimes, there are simple commercial products which are more practical and represent the best option in certain situations. You have to balance enthusiasm for open source with what the market is producing and what's practical and what you can afford.

Is there still a great deal of free labour in the open source technology sector, or are developers managing to put business plans in place? 

Many open source projects use the “freemium” model in which there are some elements of the open source code that are free, but for a larger suite of features, you pay a subscription for those services. Or perhaps they host those services for you, and you pay for their hosting services. The business model of open source software is something that is still evolving. There is a missing piece in terms of philanthropic support for open source software. If you are developing open source software that’s available to everyone, you have very few sources that you can lean on to underwrite the cost of development. So while the commercial business models have been developing around open source projects, this support for the public good aspects of open source software is missing. There have been some positive signs of change, such as Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund, which recognises the critical role that open source software often plays underneath many commercial services – indeed in the very fabric of the internet – but also that open source projects don't get the support they need, and existing business models have not necessarily worked for them. So I think, just like community networks, you need a mix of a philanthropic and commercial business model in order to thrive.