With the recent talk about hosting rates, I think that we may be neglecting what could be one of the most significant cooperative movements in recent history -- the open source movement. In open source software, the mantra, "Think of free speech, not free beer", has been an important aspect of the movement. I want to spend a moment thinking about how we can use the same philosophical orientation to benefit HCoop in our own pricing schema.
Currently, HCoop has a set of open-source tools, written by Adam and others, that allow users great freedom to configure internet services. This kind of freedom has allowed numerous members to set up dynamic web sites that not only benefit the individual users on our site, but the internet community as a whole. One of the greatest strengths of our cooperative has been this freedom, and I think that we should spend significant effort to maintain and expand it. The other part of the open-source mantra cited above claims that we should de-emphasize the notion of something being free in terms of monetary price. As everyone involved in HCoop is aware, hardware, bandwidth, and (occasionally) professional services do cost money, and in this sense particularly our cooperative cannot be free (pending a unexpected, huge donation from a benevolent member or outsider). Recently, members of the cooperative have been discussing where to draw the line between members who pay a "base" price and having to pay for additional features or capacity for their own sites or personal usage. Based on the emphasis on free speech, rather than free beer, that has been a guiding principle of open-source software, and my own observations of how current users are benefiting from our systems, I think that all current HCoop users should be given the same freedom to use the resources that we have put together, for the same cost (distributed evenly among members, with some donating money to offset costs in the transitional period that we are going through now). In the future, it is possible that a large site or organization will want to use our services, or that an existing site will expand to require more resources than what we can provide based on our basic membership rates. When that time comes, we will have to make a decision about if we can support the high-volume site, and if so, if we should either subsidize it with on existing or increased member dues, or if we should have that user or organization pay higher dues. It is my opinion that we are still far from having to make this decision in regards to a particular site or user. In conclusion, there is a kind of freedom that is able to be separated from monetary price that has been a philosophical underpinning of the open source software movement. The fact that our cooperative is "free" in terms of freedom given to members to customize services, while de-emphasizing (as much as is reasonably possible) the monetary price that is necessary to maintain the aforementioned kind of freedom, has led to the success of our cooperative. By providing a base price for membership that allows for all of the existing freedoms that users have, our organization keeps this important philosophical emphasis on "free speech" rather than "free beer". By saying that the cooperative reserves the right to re-evaluate any site at any time to see if they fall outside of what we can reasonable support, while maintaining "free speech" and a reasonable base cost for all members, we allow ourselves the ability to cooperatively decide what to do in the inevitable case that a particular site falls outside of our ability to support it without increasing dues or compromising the most important kind of freedom for our movement and the internet community. Justin S. Leitgeb _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
