The current model for funding advancements in tech in the 21st century is: quantitative easing-doped venture capital hungry for investments -> startup uses initial money to make actual tech advancement (this is the good bit) -> hypes up idea, does IPO -> ideally market monopolization and vendor lock-in -> which allows them to enshittify and extract arbitrary rent from both the supplier and consumer side of their user base and return money to the investors, for ever.
The fact that this funding model applies to tech in general is demonstrated by the broad range of fields where it has been used:
- for software, things like Figma or Medium
- for hardware, things like the Juicero (a great example of how venture capital values trendiness (juicero was wifi-connected, required an app, god forbid if AI existed at the time) over real-world utility (the juice capsules could be opened by hand))
- for biotech, things like GMO golden rice, where Monsanto disabled propagation so that farmers would have to come back to them for seeds (that’s not exactly what happened, but I’m trying to make a point).
The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.
Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model. I am convinced that the choice between open source and the Sillicon Valey model is a false dichotomy, and other ways of funding advancements in tech must exist (after all, the Sillicon Valey model has not always been the modus operandi).
Are there any hybrid business models for funding tech developments, that eg. even allow the developed tech to be open source? Has any research been done into the design of novell funding models?
And yet here we are, with the internet running mostly on free software, the amount of work put into the linux kernel exceeding anything Microsoft could do and open source LLMs being serious competitors to companies investing 10B+ USD in research.
Open source is the biggest and most successful demonstration of what is technically an anarcho-communist effort. Communist: there is a collective ownership of the means of production (the source code) and anarchist: it is developed in the absence of a coercive structure, anyone is free to make a fork.
Public funding. Why is it always forgotten in these discussions? The funding that got us computers, space rockets, internet, deep learning is actually far more important than the “silicon valley” funding style that more often than not means “slap a nice UI on a result coming from a public lab”