Public alpha also launched today. In addition to reading/commenting on whitepaper, developers can run Storj V3 and view public roadmap and public Jira. Contributing now significantly easier at https://github.com/storj/storj
"Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks." Truth.
Cloud computing is becoming the dominant model, and
the current combination of OSS licenses and public cloud players/incentives make it nearly impossible for OSS companies to monetize in the cloud. While there are no perfect answers, we either need to come up with new licenses (difficult) or pursue a new approach to cloud (decentralization) that supports OSS monetization.
To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.
This is Ben, the CEO of Docker, and Solomon's partner in crime. Being based on Apache 2.0 (and adopting an open design process, having a large number of non-Docker Inc. maintainers, having over 300 contributors) should be read as a strong signal that we will not go proprietary or even "open core." Anyone can use and modify Docker under Apache 2.0 without fear of "copyleft" or similar restrictions, which creates a strong disincentive for us to abuse our position by going proprietary. Our business plans, as stated in the blog, are around commercial support and hosted services. (In addition, being Apache vs. GPL makes it much easier for enterprises to adopt us, and much easier to get integrated into projects like OpenStack.)