{"id":260,"date":"2002-11-25T00:08:41","date_gmt":"2002-11-25T00:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"tag:owlfish.com,2004:colinweblog.20021125000841"},"modified":"2004-03-25T04:17:26","modified_gmt":"2004-03-25T04:17:26","slug":"25112002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2002\/11\/25112002\/","title":{"rendered":"Ransom model for software development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that the whole of idea of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theoretic.com\/?Ransom\">ransomware<\/a> is starting to be formalised.  The concept is that developers build software, do binary only releases and, once it has brought in a certain amount of money, they will release the source code as open source.<\/p>\n<p>It has most famously been used for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blender.org\/\">blender<\/a>, a 3D rendering program, for which EUR100,000 was raised to free the source code.  There is at least one other I know of in the form of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freepepper.org\/\">pepper<\/a>, a promising text editor that is no longer being developed.<\/p>\n<p>I like the idea because it allows software developers to build quality software that is released into the community, and get paid.  It also means that there is a direct way for consumers of software to purchase open source software in a way that directly benefits the authors, and helps the community as well.  I&#8217;m not sure how well the idea scales however.  If this model continues then we will should expect to see a few consequences fall out from it:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>There will be some developers that work hard at a project, but at the end the ransom is not met.  It&#8217;s not clear how to deal with this &#8211; the ransom website mentioned above talks about a &#8220;time bomb&#8221; to address this, but I doubt this will work (why not just wait for it to be released anyway rather than paying for it?)<\/li>\n<li>There will inevitably be some fraud and mis-understandings.  It&#8217;s going to take a while for the model to shake out and have solid contracts behined it.<\/li>\n<li>PayPal is going to be making even more money than they do now!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that the whole of idea of ransomware is starting to be formalised. The concept is that developers build software, do binary only releases and, once it has brought in a certain amount of money, they will release the source code as open source. It has most famously been used for blender, a 3D [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}