[jillesvangurp]

Market inertia is a perfect breeding ground for startups to disrupt things. We're talking about companies paying large amounts of money for a service that has a marginal cost that is effectively zero; or it could be if somebody did it properly.

The main issue is actually not doing it properly, but figuring out a business model that makes that worth doing. It's a key issue with standardizing and decentralizing a lot of things and getting them done. Technically feasibility isn't the issue. But why would you invest in it? It takes effort and where's the profit if you let go of all the control points and let others freely copy the software or implement their own. There's no upside to dedicating your life to that. You see the same issues with federated chat systems; or identity systems; or payment systems. The incumbents have no incentive to fix these things as they make money from the status quo and for outsiders to first fix it and than make no money makes no sense. Occasionally somebody tries of course with varying degrees of success. But it seems hard to convince businesses to switch to relatively unknown OSS stuff.

And of course OSS and industry standards don't just magically happen. Somebody has to pay people to work on OSS. Or at least has to care enough to dedicate non trivial amounts of time and effort to get things going. Mostly this isn't even a technology problem. You actually need lawyers and other skills to do this properly. The tech is mostly pretty trivial. Lots of off the shelf OSS stuff you can repurpose for this. I'm sure that's what Docusign did probably. I bet most of their expenses are sales, legal, and marketing rather than tech.