Hi David,
Don’t you agree that, ultimately, it has to be that simple otherwise there is no hope? Let me explain why I think that… SAFENet should be a revolution, and few revolutions emerge from the 9-5 world of offices - revolutions are born of passion and desperation.
Apart from a group of cheerleaders, like me (most of the time ) and with a handful of exceptions like happybeing who are hands-on, I don’t think there is any public engagement with the development, why would there be if there is another team getting paid to do the work - an asymmetric market if ever there was one?
Decentralisation is a purely political concept, and politics means people. To arrange the corporate structure of MaidSafe around the development of the concept is a means to insulate and incubate the design until it is ready for release - a rational starting point for any complex enterprise. However, this incubator has become a cage. We are 13 years in to the design - having consumed millions of dollars of investment and the mechanism that produces decentralisation is not yet coherent. As much as you have done and as ingenious as you and your team are, you need an influx of creativity and idealistic enthusiasm. There are plenty of brilliant minds out there who would contribute if they had the opportunity to feel like a true stakeholder and on informational par with other developers. Imagine how you’d feel if you woke up tomorrow to an inbox full of solutions and pull requests from amazing strangers?
I understand that great innovations typically happen from one mind and appear in a similar way to black swans. In this case you are that mind, but I think after 13 years, you have had time to convey the extent of your inspiration to the public so that your swan can be given wings. Please take no offence from this as none is meant, but as a member of the human race, I think it’s safe to assume that 80% of your innovation happened 13 years ago. The investment has happened and the work that you can do as a company has been done.
If you have “some tricks up our sleeve” I have no idea why they are up your sleeve! What benefit could there possibly be from keeping them to yourself? If the company is just a means to an end, rather than a vehicle for having a comfortable life working on enjoyable problems and eating out three times a week then your goal must logically be to recruit as many creative minds to the problems at hand as possible. The open source community will emerge if they are on an equal footing and have been given enough of an idea to build on. Bringing in new money to pay geographically local 9-5 developers to work in an office is a tight bottleneck at this point.
The SAFENet primer should not have been a community effort, it should have been your work and your call to action. The community produced it out of a thirst to bring coherence to the ideas - clear evidence of the revolutionary and passionate force of the crowd that is not being tapped properly.
Perhaps the worst case of MaidSafe running out of resources would actually be the best possible thing for SAFENet’s future. If you are a driven revolutionary, I would imagine that you’d then panic, draw up a paper distilling all the essential ideas and designs as concisely as possible and then spend your free time finishing it in a public forum of like minded, equal footed strangers from across the globe.
So, yeah, that’s why I think it matters if the founders are willing to work for free. If they’re not, it isn’t really a decentralised project and suffers from a high single point of failure risk. Please don’t respond to any of my points here unless you want to, you have a lot to do and I more wanted to air my views in public - perhaps it’s therapy.