In my last post to the blog, I talked about open sourcing code and building a business off it. I’m now getting more convinced that’s the way to go, and aim to pull down this site and replace it with something more suited to that purpose in the next week. The content here will be retained, but in another form and will not sit on the front page.

For those of you reading via RSS, this is a heads-up that this feed might break in the next week, but I’ll do my best to make sure everything gets directed appropriately and that all existing content on the site gets carried over to the new site - I get too much traffic from old articles to throw it away.

Anyway, onto the details of “the plan”.

One thing to note is that Vaueware’s language of choice will be Ruby, and therefore 100% (or as close to it as possible) of the code produced and put out into the wild will be Ruby. One of the goals is to lower the barrier of participation, and I believe Ruby to be one of the simplest programming languages in the World to understand, whilst also being one of the most powerful. Over the course of this year, I’ll be putting considerable effort into producing Ruby and Rails tutorials to help in getting more people involved in producing actual code: I’m big on participation.

Another thing to note is that I hope to break a paradigm here in one regard: open source is very good at copying what has been done before but very bad at genuine innovation in any one field. There are examples where this is not true, but virtually every successful open source project in existence is a clone of a commercial piece of software in some regard. If not in function, at least in genre and paradigm, we follow where others lead. I really don’t want to see Vagueware go down that route: the World has enough clones of Drupal, and in the Rails world Mephisto does nicely, thanks.

A central part of the idea for the next stage of Vagueware is an area I call “The Labs”. The idea is that anybody can sketch out ideas for new ways of doing things, for new types of application, even if they have no experience of developing software, and then interesting ideas get developed by Vagueware. This isn’t another “let’s have a competition where the best idea gets money” site, this is about encouraging that tiny corner of inspiration in all of us into a collaborative effort to produce better tools. We then build all those ideas, or as many as possible, together. And give it all away for free. Then, build revenue models around services on those tools.

So how will this work? Well, here’s a scenario:

Johnny has an idea about how to use a web application to do something interesting. He realises that he doesn’t have the skill and/or time to develop it himself, and he is more interested in seeing the idea in action than he is in making money off it.

Johnny vists the Vagueware labs site, and submits a short proposal. This gets moderated along the following criteria:

1. Can it be developed as an open source project without landing us in trouble?
2. Can it be developed by the current skill base of Vagueware and the wider community?
3. Is it an interesting and good idea?

The last one is important, but not as important as the first two. However, originality is key as the focus is on open source research and development, as opposed to open source software. I want to try weird and wonderful things nobody else has done before. It’s the only way this will be fun.

Did I mention this had to be fun? If it’s not challenging, there’s no point. Profit follows meaning, so if we create meaning out of fun and interesting projects, somehow I’ll end up being able to pay my rent. Yes, I really do believe that.

So, then Johhny’s idea is accepted, and it gets a whole area of the labs to itself, and anybody visting the labs can see it. A bunch of wiki pages are there for people to bulk the idea out, add business plans and possible uses, catches and possible risks, etc. All of this activity is open to anybody, regardless of who they are, what their background is, etc. Attached will be some basic forums for community discussion (I hate Wikipedia’s discussion pages, the lack of structure makes communication harder rather than easier), and the idea ferments.

So far, this will sound familiar to those who were around for v1.0 of Vagueware back in 2003/04. At this point though, things get a little more focused than they did back then.

At this point I code something basic - the absolute minimum to get the idea to v0.1 and place it in an SVN repository. I invite patches, I develop it further myself. If I can, I’ll pay people to work on it and add to it. As it gets closer to v1.0 hosted/packaged versions are made available for non-techs to be able to use, but anybody can download it and do what they want with it. Vagueware’s revenue will be based on offering support, maintenance and other services around that core concept. Licensing will be MIT/BSD in virtually all cases.

What about Johnny doesn’t he make something? Well, his software is now written, and he can download it and run it for free. He can bask in the glow his idea came to fruitition and he made the World a better place. He can install it on a server and market it himself. It won’t have cost him a penny to ‘develop’ the idea so that represents some decent ROI right there.

I expect in the early stages, there will be a lot of ideas around open sourcing existing platforms like YouTube, MySpace, etc. and providing a platform for people to develop those ‘traditional’ Web 2.0 ideas (if that isn’t a contradiction), but eventually it would be nice to think revenue can come in from the more revolutionary ideas that require real R&D. I’m particularly interested in Vagueware Labs focusing on software as a mode of design as opposed to churning out code.

Will it work? I have absolutely no idea. If it doesn’t, the worst case scenario is I have to go and get a real job. Best case scenario? Everybody gets involved in some interesting ideas. What if nobody submits ideas? I have a stack of about 400 of my own I’ll make public over time. The Web is full of interesting ideas. What if people take the idea and make millions off it and I end up broke? C’est la vie, personally I don’t think it’ll happen though: the key to this is in the execution and strategy, not in the idea. If I’m too lazy to execute delivery properly, I deserve to go broke.

Like I said in my last e-mail, all of this takes a reasonable amount of courage because I don’t know of anybody else doing this, and nobody is telling me this business model will work. I think it’ll pay in the long term though. If it doesn’t, back to the drawing board.