| I agree that open sourcing it is one way, but is it the best way?
Since the users depend on it, that would mean that they would pay for it right?
I think that the obvious need here is to find a way so that it would make it possible for somebody to build a good enough service and then be able to just neglect it, the same way you can neglect desktop software. Before there was an "app store", people would think the same way and just open source software they cannot find a way to build a business from but that has severely changed thanks to having something as convenient as the app store. I can think of some ways that a platform like this would work, and I think that it could be built by using something like Cloudfoundry, though I have the feeling that somebody is building it already somewhere. It could be a platform where you create an application, someone confirms that the application is good enough and does what it is intended, you push the application, and offer it to other users in the same ecosystem. Then you create the platform so that other users can clone an instance of your application by charging them. If you burn out, you can just stop developing the application, and the users that relied on your application. Otherwise you can keep on developing the application and then charge for the updates etc... etc... etc... I think someone should do it, at least an abstraction of it. I would be "too frightened" to do it, maybe you could raise VC capital and become part of the problem by saying that it is the app store for web apps or something. |