22surf: AN OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS PLAN FOR OPEN SOURCE CMS & DRM

It’s a Catch-22. Universally trusted DRM and syndicated commerce can’t work unless the business methods are open, and it is common wisdom that a business must keep its methods secret. Unless of course the business aims to build syndicable marketplaces with universally-trusted DRM riding on Open Source CMS.

This Business Plan Is released under the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License—you’re invited to add to it, to take it and change a few names, build it on your own, and become rich J. Or you can correct what we’re missing and send it on back to mcgucken@authena.org.

I. 22SURF ABSTRACT
Digital rights management (DRM) is the holy grail of the internet. It is a multi-billion-dollar, ever-expanding market, and an apt solution will be invaluable to the livelihood of all media companies. 22surf proposes that DRM will be solved with an Open Source philosophy such as that promoted by Authena. Security standards will only emerge if artist-hackers trust them. Over time, marketplaces that are best able to establish trust will prevail and snowball. The first mover in "trust" will have a lot to gain.

The business model of centralized conglomerates marketing the digital rights of a handful of artists is outdated. Both the artists and end-consumers have been flustered. A new model, consisting of a distributed network of thousands of creators hosting their content on Open Source CMS and syndicating it to trusted archives and marketplaces, is emerging. In order to build a trusted network of marketplaces supporting common standards for syndicated commerce, the business plan should be shared openly. The transparency provided by Open Source will foster the adoption of open standards for DRM and syndicated commerce. 22surf encourages artist-hackers to download our business plan for building profitable archives and marketplaces with Open Source CMS, change and build on it, and join in the following revenue streams:

1) sell keyword advertising throughout free OSCMS hosting services (blogs, galleries, etc.), 2) sell advanced hosting options/extra disk space, 3) charge 5% on content marketplace transactions, 4) charge 5% on Open Source Arts freelance services marketplace transactions, 5) manage/host media assets of large businesses (record labels/movie studios/etc.), 6) sell printing services (or partner with businesses) for hard-copy books, prints, CDs, DVDs, etc. 7) create a syndicable friendster/FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) network, 8) create a mobile FOAF service which alerts people when friends are in close proximity.

All of these revenue streams may be realized with a small team leveraging Open Source CMS such as vvgallery, oscommerce, cafelog, postnuke, and gallery. With common standards for syndication based on RSS/RDF, bands, writers, photographers, and friends will be able to enjoy syndication across multiple archives and marketplaces. Working together, trusted marketplaces utilizing open standards for syndication will prosper. Surf’s up!

The Financials/Exit Strategy: With an initial investment of $500,000 for a 20% stake in the company, 22surf aims to scale rapidly. With over 100,000 paying users in three years, as well as large corporate accounts, revenues are projected to be over $30,000,000. The exit strategy is to sell the marketplace and Open Source CMS to a larger marketplace portal such as amazon, google, redhat, or ebay.

The Opportunity: Build independent archives and marketplaces for content which support syndicated commerce. DRM is the holy grail of the internet.

The Technology: Utilize Open Source CMS connected by open Authena standards based on RDF/RSS and simple web services such as REST.

The Business/Revenue Streams: 1) Charge individuals for advanced hosting options and extra disk space, 2) charge 5% on all transactions in the content marketplace, 3) charge 5% on all transactions in the Open Source Arts services marketplace, 4) charge large businesses and institutions for managing/hosting their archives and marketplaces, and 5) sell keyword advertising throughout the free hosting services, 6) provide a friendster/FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) network which allows networking and personals with the help of RDF. 7) sell printing services (or partner with businesses) for hard-copy books, prints, CDs, DVDs, etc.

The Management: Elliot McGucken, who founded jollyroger.com in 1995 and has run it as a profitable web venture ever since will seek help from leading members of the Open Source CMS community. Anyone who wants to collaborate with us or wishes to join the Open Source CMS Renaissance is invited to set up their own 22surf network (call it anything you want, fork it, make it work better than anything we ever imagined!).

The Team: A group of talented, hard-working students is sought—CS. Studentes and business students alike! Blake Watters, who also works for ibiblio.org, will help recruit the team. Invite programmers from leading Open Source CMS’s to participate as marketplace leaders, contractors, employees, or any other way they see fit. Give them complete freedom, and always allow them to Open Source all their contributions.

The Timeline: 1) Starting yesterday, build the free archive with an RDF/RSS mechanism for the syndication of content and commerce. 2) Build the advanced paid-hosting services. 3) Build the marketplaces for syndicated commerce, content, personals (FOAF), and services. 4) Open source it all, and let the independent marketplaces evolve. 5) Sell the central, trusted marketplace to a larger portal.

The Investors: Anyone who wants to fund a small team of programmers, or any programmer who has the time to build a marketplace of their own.

The Need: The model of centralized conglomerates promoting and managing the digital rights of a handful of artists and authors is no longer proving profitable. A new model of a distributed network of tens of thousands of artists, hosting their content on Open Source CMS and syndicating it to various marketplaces, is emerging. Future business models riding on Open Source will rely on a robust open rating system, a philosophy for creating and defining parallel forms of a digital file with varying qualities and watermarkings, and standards for defining the rights associated with the content.

The Laws: By embracing Open source CMS and Creators’ Rights, 22surf finds itself on the right side of the laws: Metcalfe’s Law, Moore’s Law, and Constitutional Law.

22SURF will be built upon Authena which was presented at the 2003 Harvard OSCOM conference (http://authena.org). A fuller description is provided in Appendix II, and here’s the abstract:

By providing a set of modules and an architectural philosophy for generating RDF/RSS descriptions incorporating the Dublin Core and the extensible Creative Commons licenses, Authena seeks to marry a full spectrum of rights definitions to Open Source CMS. A second set of modules capable of reading RSS feeds and retrieving rights descriptions and content via a REST protocol will enable syndicated content distribution across a network of CMS. Modules capable of generating RDF rights descriptions and embedding them in media and RSS feeds allow media shops, galleries, and content repositories to syndicate media via a REST protocol. Individual creators, businesses, and institutions hosting content in Open Source CMS can syndicate it to OSS repositories or marketplaces endowed with transaction and royalty-tracking capabilities. Repositories and marketplaces can in turn syndicate their content to yet other markets and repositories while preserving rights descriptions and recording transactions, affording a decentralized distribution model that binds the rights description to the actual medium of syndication. Whereas RSS is generally used for syndicating newsfeeds, Authena uses RSS to syndicate rights information and links to digital media in different formats, including thumbnailed, watermarked, and high-quality originals in secure directories, so as to facilitate the indexing, harvesting, and selling of content on the semantic web in accordance with rights defined by the creator.

1. Photography: Jenny wishes to create a portfolio of photographs taken during her summer trip to Wyoming, and perhaps sell some. With a few mouseclicks, she launches a photo gallery powered by the Open Source gallery project at 22gallery.com. She uploads her pictures and enters the rights information, releasing a few pictures under Creative Commons licenses. A client-side Authena module at pnavy.com watermarks the pictures and embeds RDF license descriptions in the media using EXIF. The Authena module also generates an RSS feed containing the rights descriptions and locations of the images. Jenny then opens accounts at stock photography shops including westgallery.com and wyominggallery.com, both powered by Oscommerce with photography and Authena modules (vvgallery.org), and syndicates her pictures to the stock photography marketplaces. A server-side Authena module at wyominggallery.com (or 22stockphotography.com) reads the RSS feed residing on the same server as Jenny's portfolio, and using her Authena password she entered when registering, wyominggallery.com transfers and logs rights information, thumbnails, watermarked versions, and the pristine originals via a REST protocol over https. The originals distributed under the CC license are kept in a public directory, while the proprietary originals are encrypted and/or kept within a password-protected directory. A greeting card company in Ireland browses thumbnailed and watermarked versions of the pictures at wyominggallery.com, and after using a couple of Jenny's public domain photographs, they purchase publishing rights to her proprietary photographs, and download a zipped package of high-resolution originals off the wyominggallery.com server. Jenny is compensated accordingly by wyominggallery.com.

CMS Client Hosting Jenny's Pictures: Gallery/Postnuke/Phpnuke with Authena Modules

CMS Server Selling Jenny's Pictures: Oscommerce with photography and Authena modules (VVGallery)

2. Music: The Tain Collins Band records their first CD. With a few mouseclicks at 22band.com, they launch a postnuke-powered website devoted to their CD, making three songs available for download with the CC licenses. An Authena module generates the RDF/RSS rights description for the entire album. An Authena spider from freestreaming.com parses the rights information, and grabs the mp3s released under the CC licenses, preserving the Attribute license. The Tain Collins Band registers for accounts at cdworld.com and streamingbands.com to syndicate their CD's content, providing the sites with their Authena password. Authena modules at cdworld.com and streamingbands.com look back at the RSS feed at the Tain Collins website, and the digital content and rights are transferred and logged via a REST protocol over https. Thumbnails (10 second song clips), watermarked (songs with irregularities or lower audio quality), and the pristine originals, stored in the password-protected Authena directory, are transferred. People can buy physical CD's from cdworld.com (oscommerce powered), or they can subscribe to access streamed music from streamingbands.com (netjuke powered). Both cdworld.com and streamingbands.com compensate The Tain Collins Band in proportion to how often the music is listened to via streaming media or ordered via physical copies of the CD.

3. Books: Kelly has written a book about windsurfing. With a few mouseclicks at 22nuke.com she launches a Phpnuke portal devoted to her passion. She makes the first chapter of her book available for download off her site, releasing it with a CC license which is manifested in the RSS feed. She syndicates the entire book to niche CMS marketplaces including allsports.com and booksondemand.com. The digital files are transferred and logged via a REST protocol over https. David comes across Kelly's site, and after reading the first chapter, he wants a hard copy. He follows the link to booksondemand.com and finding another book on windsurfing, he decides he wants them both. Booksondemand.com lets David combine the two files into one book, which he orders and receives at a local Kinkos with a print-on-demand press.

CMS Server Selling Kelly's Book: Oscommerce/VVGallery with Authena and book-publishing modules

4. Film/Educational Repositories: Greg shoots a documentary pertaining to peoples' favorite great books. He creates a personal CMS portal at 22gallery.com/greg and uploads mpegs of his work. He releases it all under the Creative Commons Attribute license. The UCLA film school finds his technique amazing, and they add his work to their repository. This will bring some renown to Greg, so he's psyched. And because the Authena modules are already installed in Greg's Gallery, and the UCLA film school has an Authena-empowered repository at uclafilm.org, all they have to do is point it at the RDF/RSS feed at Greg's site. The UCLA Authena server modules read the CC licenses in the RSS feed on Greg's site, and seeing that they grant permissions to use the files as long as they cite Greg, the Authena module ports the film clips into UCLA's repository, preserving the CC licenses.

CMS Server Hosting UCLA Film Repository: Oscommerce/VVGallery with Authena or Netjuke with film modules and Authena

5. Corporate Repositories: Apple computer is creating a repository of all film created under a Creative Commons license. Having installed the Authena server modules, they employ google, searching for every site containing an authena.php file, which generates the RSS/RDF feed. They scan the RSS feeds, checking the Dublin Core "dc:format" tag for avi's and mpeg movie formats, and the cc:license tag for appropriate rights. Finding Greg's movies at the UCLA film repository, and ascertaining the CC licenses allow their use in the given context, the UCLA Authena modules upload the digital files into their own repositories, maintaining the digital rights descriptions.

6. Gaming: Independent game developers post their mods and original graphics on their own Postnuke sites at 22nuke.com. Many of them release their early work under CC licenses, to gain publicity. Opensourcegamer.org continually scans the RSS Authena feeds at gamernuke.com and several other gaming communities, downloading all the new mods and graphics released under CC licenses, so as to become a repository for public domain mods.

7. FOAF/friends/dating/personals: Greg, Tain, Kelly, and Jenny from the previous scenarios were also afforded a friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) profile at 22surf.com in RDF when they signed up for an account. They all elect to activate their FOAF profiles, and syndicate them to various FOAF networks, including 22newyork.com and 22sanfrancisco.com, and they end up meeting. Kelly and Tain get married.

Moore’s law fosters ever more bountiful bandwidth, falling costs of cpu’s and storage media, and the proliferation of a pervasive wireless network, while Metcalfe’s Law is fostering the Open Source movement. Together they are creating a Great Divide in the business world. Yesterday’s proprietary software goliaths such as Microsoft and Oracle are up against a global network of the best and brightest working away in research labs, within academia, and in garages. Yesterday’s centralized media conglomerates are up against the Open Source CMS renaissance and a global army of artist-hackers who are recording, publishing, hosting, and selling their intellectual property on LAMP-based platforms. Software and media companies which embrace the new landscape defined by software and connectivity as free and ubiquitous as air itself will make it across the Great Divide. Yesterday’s business models, which tend to be hype and marketing oriented, will meet with less and less success.

As software is fundamentally based on mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms can’t be patented, the Open Source movement is free to deliver any major functionality needed by the end-user. Companies which seek to circumvent the natural and best algorithms in order to impose proprietary standards will not make it past the Great Divide. Rather, companies which sell expertise in working with open standards, and support the development of open standards, will benefit.

Nowhere is the presence of this Great Divide so apparent as in the realm of media.

Record sales have been plummeting, and the increases in computing power will also affect the media. Open source is positioned to take full advantage of Metcalfe’s law, because Open Source has a better chance of fostering open standards. The killer app of the open source movement may be Open Source CMS. It is the bridge between the operating system and the layman. Because Open Source applications tend to be hosted and developed on servers running Open Source operating systems, the open source CMS movement is moving away from proprietary platforms. The vast majority of people utilize the web for content, from reading news to hosting pictures to downloading music, and thus as the Open Source CMS movement progresses, proprietary operating systems will be less and less important.

Perhaps less money will made selling software, but the typical individual will be empowered, both as a creator and a consumer. Creators will gain a plethora of networked marketplaces, along with the ability to choose from a full spectrum of rights definitions, while consumers will be afforded a greater spectrum of content. No longer will centralized corporate conglomerates have a monopoly in publishing and disseminating content.

Businesses on the right side of the laws, including Metcalfe’s, Moore’s, and Constitutional Law, will cross the Great Divide. Such businesses will favor the individual over the bureaucracy. Marketing and hype from the PR department will be less and less relevant, and word-of-mouth shall be ever more important for these businesses built upon the Open Source CMS Renaissance.

22surf aims to build a network of independently owned businesses on the right side of the laws—Metcalfe’s Law, Moore’s Law, and Constitutional Law:

2. Functionality is as free as the basic algorithms behind it. Open Source applications approach the asymptote of optimal functionality and features. Open Source tends to use open standards based on higher laws and aesthetics.

Implications for 22surf: Use Open source Software to the hilt. Don’t try to out-guess the Open Source community or write proprietary applications, as not only do they require large overhead, but they will miss out on the trends of the future. Microsoft, ebay, amazon, and yahoo are largely proprietary systems, but that was then and this is now. Forget about Oracle—MYSQL and POSTGRES will be there.

Implications for 22surf: Use generic LINTEL hardware with plenty of redundancy. Architect a distributed network for scalability as google does. Disk space, processing power, and bandwidth will allow companies to triumph on inexpensive lintel hardware arranged in a distributed manner. Again, forget about Oracle—the hardware will allow MYSQL and POSTGRES to scale.

From the U.S. Constitution: “The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” Implications for 22surf: Respect the Creator. DRM is cool—give it back to the individual. The network bypasses the middlemen conglomerates and allows the true spirit of the Constitution to thrive.

22surf aims to build the world’s largest marketplaces and archives for content. This will be built upon the leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) endowed with open standards enabling syndicated commerce across a myriad of Open Source CMS’s.

Not so long ago Google purchased Blogger. Blogger derives its value from peoples' passions, and Google’s fundamental philosophy is to mine the natural democratic intelligence of the web so as to foster high-quality searches throughout that great archive known as the WWW. In addition to fostering a more meaningful archive described with RDF, 22surf also aims to build a network of syndicated marketplaces to allow creators a new form of distribution.

When one ponders the sum total of passion hosted within Open Source CMS such as postnuke, cafelog, gallery, one begins to see that Open Source CMS could be the killer-app of the Open Source world—not by selling the software so much as archiving the content and allowing creators to sell it. As more bands, writers, artists, photographers, and teachers use applications such as postnuke, tiki, gallery, xoops, envolution, cafelog, and oscommerce to share and sell content on the semantic web, more and more value will be found within the Open Source applications, both from an archival and commercial standpoint.

Couple Open Source CMS with the open RDF/RSS1.0 standards and the Dublin Core and CC Licenses, and suddenly it seems the Open Source world has a good chance of establishing universal standards for syndicated commerce and DRM—not by fiat, but by democratic adoption.

And as Moore's law marches on, making audio and video-on-demand a reality, and Metcalfe's Law brings us better OSCMS each and every day, more and more passion will be contained within Open Source CMS.

In addition to providing an architecture for modules supporting syndicated commerce, Authena is a “Philosophy of Creators’ Rights,” and the 22surf archive and marketplace will be built upon the three pillars of Authena:

1. Full Artistic Control: Open Source CMS allows Artist-Hackers to get under the hood to change themes, graphics, UI, sound quality, modules, etc.

2. Distribution: Open Source CMS coupled with RDF/RSS fosters efficient searches and syndication on the semantic web, and thus effective distribution.

3. DRM: Open Source CMS coupled with an extensible rights language such as the CC licenses expressed in RDF/RSS allows a full spectrum of rights definitions in parallel with distribution. Open security standards and protocols afford financial transactions, secure delivery, and trusted ratings for marketplaces and content.

Why is a distributed network of content marketplaces so cool? Were it not for the poets and prophets in the Bazaar, there'd be nothing to build the Cathedral around. 22surf harbors a vast respect for the individual artist and lone creator. 22surf aims to be on the right side of the laws—Metcalfe’s, Moore’s, and Constitutional Law. In the following figure is a diagram of the networked marketplaces we envision, as well as the antiquated marketplace it replaces:

A question to the Open Source CMS Community: How shall we build these pillars so that they support a Cathedral and a Bazaar?

X. Technology for Creators' Rights

1. FULL ARTISTIC CONTROL	2. DISTRIBUTION	3. DRM/COMPENSATION
Postnuke, Netjuke, Phpnuke, Gallery, Xoops, Cafelog, Drupal, TikiWiki, GIMP, Open Office...	HTTP, RDF/RSS, REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, Blogger API, Syndic8 API, Oscommerce	SSL, PGP, RDF/RSS, Dublin Core, CC Licenses, Oscommerce
Authena: VVGallery, Netjuke
VVGallery: Gallery	RDF/RSS, REST	RSS1.0, Dublin Core, CC Licenses, Oscommerce
Netjuke: Netjuke	RDF/RSS, REST	RSS1.0, Dublin Core, CC Licenses, Oscommerce

Throughout the nineties Wall Street was right about the power of the internet—they were just wrong about who was going to realize it. Check out Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet at amazon.com or Borders.

In an article entitled, 'New Media': Ready for the Dustbin of History, “The New York Times wrote, 'In fact, there is little natural affinity between software and media. A National Research Council study to be published this week, "Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation and Creativity," As long as the tools required to produce computer-mediated work are programming tools, the result will be programmer-created design.... There is a great distance, from the paintbrush or piano to programming in C++." -- The New York Times May 11th, 2003

All this changes in the Open Source CMS Renaissance, wherein Artist-hackers are decreasing the distance between the art and the application.

Recently the Supreme Court and Congress have collaborated in amending Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States constitution:

ORIGINAL TEXT: The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

TODAY'S VERSION: The Congress shall have Power To perhaps promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for (limited Times)^n to DisneyAOLTimeWarner/Major Media Goliaths the exclusive Right to others' Writings and Discoveries;

VVGallery, which can be downloaded from vvgallery.sourceforge.net, marries Gallery and Oscommerce via Authena philosophy

∙Proprietary pictures are watermarked, and originals can only be downloaded upon payment

∙System could be used for be used for film, books, music, movies, and/or any other form of digital media.

Google recently purchased blogger. Blogger derives its value from peoples' passions. Think about the sum total of passion represented within all the Open Source CMS out there. And as Moore's law marches on, making audio and video-on-demand a reality, and Metcalfe's Law brings us better OSCMS each and every day, think about where all the passion will be expressed in a few years.

Could Open Source CMS be the killer-app of the Open Source world? The way I see it, as more bands, writers, artists, photographers, and teachers use postnuke, gallery, xoops, envolution, cafelog, and oscommerce to join the semantic web, more and more servers will run Linux.

Couple this with the open RDF/RSS1.0 standards and the Dublin Core and CC Licenses, and suddenly it seems the Open Source world has a good chance of establishing the common universal standards for archiving content and managing digital rights.

This will grant Creators a great freedom to define how their content is used, in line with the Consitution's original spirit.

In a robust hosting facility with redundant lintel servers, 22surf aims to build the world’s largest content archive by offering free hosting upon Open Source CMSs including cafelog, postnuke, tiki, gallery, netjuke, and more. These verticle niches will be named 22blog, 22nuke, 22gallery, 22commerce, 22friend, and so on. By endowing all these applications with Authena standards for rights definitions and syndication, 22surf aims to foster syndicated commerce while creating a content marketplace in which any creator or hoster of content may sell their creations. OScommerce will provide the backbone for the commercial marketplace, and all modules and advancements will be released back into the Open Source community.

22surf is a quilt—the patches, being Open Source CMSs, come in different shapes and sizes, while Authena is the thread of common standards which allows cross-application syndication of both content and rights information. Authena facilitates syndicated commerce over a distributed network of Open Source applications connected by web services. By providing a set of modules and an architectural philosophy for generating RDF/RSS descriptions incorporating the Dublin Core and the extensible Creative Commons licenses, Authena marries a full spectrum of rights definitions to Open Source CMS. A second set of modules capable of reading RSS feeds and retrieving rights descriptions and content via a secure REST protocol enables syndicated ecommerce across a network of CMS. Whereas RSS is generally used for syndicating newsfeeds, Authena uses RSS to syndicate rights information and links to digital media in different formats, including thumbnailed, watermarked, and high-quality originals in secure directories, so as to facilitate the indexing, harvesting, and selling of content on the semantic web in accordance with rights defined by the creator. With Authena, artists, creators, businesses, and institutions hosting content in a wide array of Open Source CMS can syndicate it to one-other as well as to repositories and marketplaces endowed with transaction and royalty-tracking capabilities. VVGallery (vvgallery.sourceforge.net) offers a working implementation of Authena modules which provide a bridge between the open source Gallery and osCommerce projects. Users can upload pictures to Gallery, define default rights, and publish them to osCommerce. 22stockphotography.com provides a working demonstration of the Authena bridge between a photo gallery and an ecommerce site. Authena modules can support all types of content including music, video, and images, and Open Source CMS including postnuke, netjuke, phpnuke, gallery, oscommerce, and tikiwiki.

22Surf will grant Creators a great freedom to define how their content is used, in line with the Consitution's original spirit. Working together, the Open Source CMS community can build a global network of content archives and marketplaces for authors, artists, and creators. 22surf aims to seed Open Source CMS projects with funds to encourage the development of an Open Source Standards for content syndication.

The following free hosting services would be quickly ramped up. When a user registers for any one of them, they will be granted accounts across the entirety of these 22surf verticals.

22band: band sites powered by customized postnukes with calendars, galleries, etc.

22surf wants every recording artist to become their own label, for every author to become their own publisher, for every photographer to become their own distributor. 22surf wants groups of artists to create a marketplace for a new sound, it wants groups of authors to create a marketplace for a literary renaissance, bypassing the centralized corporate conglomerates. Beginning with the leading Open Source CMS’s, 22surf will tailor the software for the needs of specific artists, enable turn-key installation for the layman, and release it back to the community. By doing so, 22surf can create a trusted brand for creators, complete with standards developed by Artist-Hackers enabling syndicated commerce.

22surf seeks an initial investment of $400,000 in exchange for 20% of the company. The funds will seed the creation of a global network of marketplaces based on Open Source CMS which would allow syndicated commerce for content. Half the funds would be distributed throughout the Open Source CMS community, while the other half would be dedicated to building a robust hosting facility and trusted Open Source marketplace for syndicated commerce. Here are the 1^st year financials:

n B2B: first year 1,000-10,000 subscribers paying $10/month = $120,000 to $1,200,000

22surf is assembling a team of leading developers from The Open Source CMS community throughout the world. Depending on their interests and fit, they may be offered both equity and stock. Send a cover letter and a resume to mcgucken@authena.org.

The model of centralized conglomerates promoting and managing the digital rights of a handful of artists and authors is no longer proving profitable. A new model of a distributed network of tens of thousands of artists, hosting their content on Open Source CMS and syndicating it to various marketplaces, is emerging. Future business models riding on Open Source will rely on a robust open rating system, a philosophy for creating and defining parallel forms of a digital file with varying qualities and watermarkings, and standards for defining the rights associated with the content. The good news is that the technology is there, relying on RDF for rights and files definitions and REST web-services protocols for content syndication.

Revenues will derive from seven primary sources, most of which can be built from “off the shelf” CMS:

5. A services marketplace for artists, creators, and programmers can buy and sell services.

6. A friendster/FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) network which allows networking and personals with the help of RDF.

7. a mobile FOAF service which alerts people when friends are in close proximity.

22surf will be the central launching pad and marketplace for content hosted at satellite sites based on Open Source CMS including 22blog (café log), 22photo (gallery), 22friend (FOAF), 22tiki (tiki), 22commerce (oscommerce), 22video (gallery for video), 22book, 22nuke (postnuke, phpnuke, etc.), 22journal (live journal), 22band (postnuke for bands) (etc.)—all of which offer free hosting on leading Open Source applications. Anyone who registers for an account on any site will be given a master account on 22surf, which will serve as an account throughout the 22surf network. For instance, if one registers a blog at 22blog, they will get a gallery at 22photo. Basic hosting is free, and added features including extra disk space, ftp access, and domain names will be offered for a small fee, relentlessly brought down by triumphant march of Moore’s law. As this is an open source business plan, feel free to come up with your own version, such as the 33surf network consisting of 33blog, 33tiki, 33photo, etc.

22surf is based on the premise that there is a vast value contained within peoples’ passions. Google’s search algorithms and intrinsic value are based on the living democracy of peoples’ passions—people link to sites they like, and google mines this information to present relevant search results. Google purchased blogger because blogs are a weathervane to the prevailing winds of millions of niche topics, and thus provide valuable information for people conducting searches. By fostering an RSS/RDF standard, 22surf will create value on the semantic web by allowing creators to define fundamental information concerning their work.

22surf reaches out to artists and creators by offering them a new mechanism for content distribution and compensation, and it derives its value as both a marketplace and a archival fountain of content which users themselves mark up in a common RDF based language by designating rights and descriptions in simple forms.

A bridge to foster the fluid exchange of content and rights information would be constructed across the leading Open Source CMS’s, and the methods which emerge would become an organically-grown standard for syndicated commerce. Authena.org outlines much of what this bridge could look like, and it emphasizes the use of existing, open technologies for DRM including SSL and PGP for security, RDF/RSS for rights descriptions and synidcation, REST (or SOAP/XML-RPC) for content exchange. Authena does not exist to impose standards, but rather it exists to adopt standards.

The major task to be completed across leading Open Source CMS is the creation of a common RDF interface for defining rights accompanied by the creation of modules to facilitiate the transport of content and rights descriptions into various marketplaces and the fair compensation of the creator or owner of the content.

Not only is the technology Open Source, but so is the actual business plan. Only with utter openness will practical standards emerge amongst the Open Source community, as the better programmers are more often motivated by aesthetics than a desire to impose arbitrary standards for financial gain. A large company like Microsoft has a lot to gain by imposing standards, while an Open Source programmer can only lose by valuing ego over aesthetics. Thus the Open Source community is best suited to creating broadly-accepted standards for DRM.

Yes. But few traditional companies would create a truly Open Source marketplace. Many companies are of the mindset that software and intellectual property based on software are vast assets. Software is free. As it is based on mathematical algorithms and abstractions, like physical law and mathematical algorithms, it does not lend itself well to being help proprietary. Just as language evolved via Open Standards—a language that supported Shakespeare as well as Melville, 22surf and Authena will evolve by open standards.

More than anything, 22surf is about a trusted brand—it must remain open from beginning to end in creating a marketplace for digital content.

Employees will be sought from leading Open Source CMS projects. Whenever a module or hack is needed in a particular CMS, the project will be shopped around to the community, in an appropriate place on their message boards, and on opensourcearts.com. A distributed network of employees will grow over time, with the free market determining the price of customized contributions.

A core team of programmers working at 22surf will also be assembled. The jobs of these programmers will be to anticipate and perceive the prevailing vision regarding Open Source CMS as well as to lead it. If individuals can be found spanning two of the job titles, all the better! Some of these positions may begin as and remain remote postions, depending on the locales and ease of relocation. The five internal staff would include:

1) 22Surf Chief Systems Administrator: Advanced LAMP and systems administration experience. This person should be comfortable architecting a scalable system running RedHat linux which will accompany single sign on for multiple Open Source CMS applications while operating robustly for millions of accounts.

2) 22Surf Marketplace: Advanced LAMP and systems administration experience. This person should have advanced experience in OSCommerce, and they will be responsible for integrating a multi-vendor hack, and seeing that OSCommerce can scale to millions of records.

3) 22Surf Syndicated Commerce: Advanced LAMP experience required, along with a broad knowledge of security techniques for delivering content, and the knowledge of RDF/RSS.

4) 22Surf Systems Administrator: Answers to the chief systems administrator and is in charge of diligently keeping backups.

5) 22Surf Customizer: Advanced LAMP experience required. Customize LAMP applications as 22Surf grows for bands, clubs, record labels, video archives, and more. Open Source all the modifications. For instance, customize postnuke for bands by adding modules including the calendar, forums, and a gallery. Allow bands to upload their content into the application.

Depending on the quality of the vision and the execution, some of these custom hacks will be incorporated into the original code bases. At any rate, all these hacks will be released as Open Source, back into the community.

A syndicable marketplace based on oscommerce will be built and maintained at 22surf, and the technology would be open-sourced so that anyone else could build such a marketplace. All creators can elect to syndicate their content into a marketplace, and all marketplaces can elect to syndicate their content into other marketplaces. Thus over time trusted marketplaces will emerge for music, books, photography, and video. Initial investors who fund the early implementations of the trusted marketplaces could benefit vastly from their investments. Even though all the software would be open-sourced, and anyone else would be able to create the exact same marketplace, the brand would offer a great return to the initial investors, as it would be were the majority of sellers and buyers came to sell and buy. Such a central marketplace would have responsibilities to the greater Open Source community including the upholding of the spirit of Open Source, and the fair and just compensation of all creators and artists using the system.

1) Build software which is capable of managing and installing leading LAMP applications.

It’s a Catch-22. Universally trusted DRM and syndicated commerce can’t work unless the business methods are open, and it is common wisdom that a business must keep its methods secret. Unless of course the business aims to help creators distribute their content in syndicable marketplaces with universally-trusted DRM.

Security standards will only emerge if artist-hackers trust them. Over time, marketplaces that are best able to establish trust will prevail and snowball. The first mover in "trust" would have a lot to gain.

It is ultimately trust that any such business is built on, and thus a brand that establishes trust by providing a fair and open marketplace would become the company's most valuable asset. A brand that allows creators to become their own record labels, publishers, stock photography shops, and producers by offering inexpensive, Open Source CMS solutions, while also providing a central trusted marketplace where the record labels and publishers can syndicate their content, will prevail. The proposed business would control the brand while giving the software away and allowing anyone to set up marketplaces of their own. Anyone who set up a smaller marketplace could elect to syndicate their content to any other marketplace. Thus the large, trusted marketplaces will grow ever larger.

Build marketplaces for Open Source Services and content and take 5% of all transactions.

Charge $10/month for ftp access, for full use of the FOAF service, for domain names, for ad-free web pages.

Rather than focusing on digital rights, the new Open Source CMS technologies will focus on creators’ rights, allowing artists, authors, and musicians to choose markets and define rights, independent of media conglomerates. Today creators are empowered by a suite of open CMS riding on top of Moore’s law and falling bandwidth prices. Upon the likes of postnuke and phpnuke, creators are free as never before to publish to the world. And as these CMS applications evolve with modules supporting publishing, commerce, and rights management, new business models will emerge by which creators and companies which embrace and extend the creators’ newfound freedoms, will prosper.

Open source LAMP content management systems are the killer apps which will take Linux beyond Microsoft in the content space, in addition to the server space. Open source content management systems are natural extensions of open source platforms, and thus applications such as the Nuke family, OSCommerce, Netjuke, and Gallery will make Linux the natural platform for companies hosting and selling content. Meta-data standards, based on RDF, the Dublin Core, and the CC Licenses, are emerging for the suite of open source applications, and because they will be open, they’ll succeed as a foundation for rights management. Whereas proprietary companies such as Microsoft and Blackboard have it in their best interest to define standards, open source applications have it in their best interest to adopt leading standards, and thus useful, robust standards have a better chance of arising from the open source CMS renaissance.

What will these Creators’ Rights standards look like, and what will they allow?

The Authena project proposes that Creators’ Rights should begin more as a philosophy of empowering creators with open source CMS, and then as working paradigms emerge via large-scale adoption, they may become standards. Too many bodies are trying to impose standards from the top down, whereas standards have a better chance being built from the ground up, beginning with simple implementations which add useful functionality to open source CMS systems. Based on the RDF specification, the Dublin Core, and the Creative Commons licenses, Authena will allow a full spectrum of rights management. Authena will afford a new paradigm of syndicated commerce, thereby allowing creators to host their content on an open source CMS such as postnuke, and syndicate it to any number of trusted marketplaces also based open commerce systems such as oscommerce.

The Rest protocol is simpler and it gets the job done. For future versions, it may very well be that XML-RPC and SOAP would have features that would enhance Authena’s functionality, but for now, REST will do. We enjoy REST because it’s more of a architecture or philosophy based upon the inherent functionality of the web rather than a standard. As Roger L. Costello stated in his online tutorial, “In the context of the Web, the REST approach is the preferred and most cost-effective architectural style for implementing services due to it’s scalability, its ability to allow dynamic connectivity without prior planning, its ability to enable independent evolution of clients and services, and its built-in support for caching and security.” (http://www.xfront.com/REST.html)

The Authena Namespace Elements

In contemplating the Authena namespace elements (http://authena.org/rss/1.0/), I have been asking myself, "What additional data is needed by a search engine, or a Google, to allow the buying and selling of content?" Perhaps the Authena namespace (or some of the elements) could be expressed entirely within the Dublin Core. But for the moment, I'm treating it as distinct.

Well, first off, it seems that Creators would need to define three forms of their content in their RSS feeds:

Then, the Creator needs to decide if they want to release their content into the public domain or keep at least the original under lock and key.

 authena:license ( #PCDATA ) (This may be redundant, as this information could also be in the Dublin Core and CC elements).

This would entail some form of security--we've been pondering several ways of providing basic security and DRM, including simple password authentication, SSL, PGP, secure XML, and Java applets coupled with REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, so suppose Authena can choose from one of several leading protocols--in the RSS feed we'd want to let everyone know which one we were using, which suggests:

Then, if someone's selling their content, they'd want to establish a price, which would contain a number and the currency:

And the Creator would be free to choose multiple marketplaces to which to syndicate their content, which would suggest:

The Creator would have a username and a password associated with logging into the marketplace, so that their content may be securely transported, and so that they can check their accounts, update their payment information, and track how well their content is selling. This would suggest:

And finally, in order to gain popularity with buyers and sellers, trust must be established. This may be accomplished in a democratic manner by allowing ratings of both marketplaces and content. The ratings would be overseen and hosted by trusted authorities who would prevent ballot-stuffing by allowing only one vote per registered account or IP address. This would suggest:

Again, users would be free to choose their ratings authorities, but they'd of course wish to go with the more popular and "trusted" ones. There is commercial incentive to becoming a trusted ratings authority and/or marketplace, and thus diligent leaders in this space will emerge.

Authena: Modules for RDF Rights Descriptions and Syndicated Distribution Across Open Source CMS

CMS such as Postnuke, Phpnuke, Netjuke, and Gallery are being enhanced with Authena client modules. The Dublin Core and the CC Licenses have been integrated into the Open Source Gallery project at http://pnavy.com/dcgallery. OSS with transaction capabilities, such as Oscommerce, are being enhanced with early Authena digital media modules--an early rendition for images may be found at http://vvgallery.org/. OS news aggregators, such as Amphetadesk and Aggie, may be modified to become rights description and content aggregators.

The only place the word "right" appears in the United States Constitution is in the following passage:

The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Authena's philosophy is to leverage Open Source CMS technologies along with rights languages to afford creators the full spectrum of their inherent rights.

1. Creators will be free to designate hosts and marketplaces for their content. No contracts need be signed with corporate conglomerates to facilitate basic rights management and global distribution.

2. Creators will be afforded a full spectrum of rights options via the extensible Creative Commons licenses.

3. Authena client and server modules will remain open and free, in accordance with the GPL license.

4. RDF/RSS feeds will contain digital rights descriptions within the framework of the extensible CC License and Dublin Core schemas.

5. Three fundamental types of media formats--thumbnailed, watermarked, and pristine original--will be described in the RDF/RSS feed, which may employ an Authena schema in addition to the Dublin Core and CC License schemas.

6. Pristine originals of media may be encrypted or stored within a password-protected directory, should the creator's chosen license necessitate this.

7. Web services employed by Authena will be based on simple paradigms, implying the use of REST, which also offers strong support for the semantic web.

8. A robust ratings system will be built into Authena clients and servers, which will allow for the ranking of content as well as the repositories and marketplaces. These rankings will be made available within the RSS feeds. Rankings facilitated by trusted sources will be given more credibility, so as to discourage ballot-stuffing.

9. Security and encryption, when needed by the creator's chosen license, will be provided by open source technologies including SSL and PGP.

1. Photography: Jenny wishes to create a portfolio of photographs taken during her summer trip to Wyoming, and perhaps sell some. With a few mouseclicks, she launches a photo gallery powered by the Open Source gallery project at pnavy.com. She uploads her pictures and enters the rights information, releasing a few pictures under Creative Commons licenses. A client-side Authena module at pnavy.com watermarks the pictures and embeds RDF license descriptions in the media using EXIF. The Authena module also generates an RSS feed containing the rights descriptions and locations of the images. Jenny then opens accounts at stock photography shops including westgallery.com and wyominggallery.com, both powered by Oscommerce with photography and Authena modules (vvgallery.org), and syndicates her pictures to the stock photography marketplaces. A server-side Authena module at wyominggallery.com reads the RSS feed residing on the same server as Jenny's portfolio, and using her Authena password she entered when registering, wyominggallery.com transfers and logs rights information, thumbnails, watermarked versions, and the pristine originals via a REST protocol over https. The originals distributed under the CC license are kept in a public directory, while the proprietary originals are encrypted and/or kept within a password-protected directory. A greeting card company in Ireland browses thumbnailed and watermarked versions of the pictures at wyominggallery.com, and after using a couple of Jenny's public domain photographs, they purchase publishing rights to her proprietary photographs, and download a zipped package of high-resolution originals off the wyominggallery.com server. Jenny is compensated accordingly by wyominggallery.com.

CMS Client Hosting Jenny's Pictures: Gallery/Postnuke/Phpnuke with Authena Modules

CMS Server Selling Jenny's Pictures: Oscommerce with photography and Authena modules (VVGallery)

2. Music: The Tain Collins Band records their first CD. With a few mouseclicks at bandnuke.net, they launch a postnuke-powered website devoted to their CD, making three songs available for download with the CC licenses. An Authena module generates the RDF/RSS rights description for the entire album. An Authena spider from freestreaming.com parses the rights information, and grabs the mp3s released under the CC licenses, preserving the Attribute license. The Tain Collins Band registers for accounts at cdworld.com and streamingbands.com to syndicate their CD's content, providing the sites with their Authena password. Authena modules at cdworld.com and streamingbands.com look back at the RSS feed at the Tain Collins website, and the digital content and rights are transferred and logged via a REST protocol over https. Thumbnails (10 second song clips), watermarked (songs with irregularities or lower audio quality), and the pristine originals, stored in the password-protected Authena directory, are transferred. People can buy physical CD's from cdworld.com (oscommerce powered), or they can subscribe to access streamed music from streamingbands.com (netjuke powered). Both cdworld.com and streamingbands.com compensate The Tain Collins Band in proportion to how often the music is listened to via streaming media or ordered via physical copies of the CD.

3. Books: Kelly has written a book about windsurfing. With a few mouseclicks at surf.net she launches a Phpnuke portal devoted to her passion. She makes the first chapter of her book available for download off her site, releasing it with a CC license which is manifested in the RSS feed. She syndicates the entire book to niche CMS marketplaces including allsports.com and booksondemand.com. The digital files are transferred and logged via a REST protocol over https. David comes across Kelly's site, and after reading the first chapter, he wants a hard copy. He follows the link to booksondemand.com and finding another book on windsurfing, he decides he wants them both. Booksondemand.com lets David combine the two files into one book, which he orders and receives at a local Kinkos with a print-on-demand press.

CMS Server Selling Kelly's Book: Oscommerce/VVGallery with Authena and book-publishing modules

4. Film/Educational Repositories: Greg shoots a documentary pertaining to peoples' favorite great books. He creates a personal CMS portal at filmgallery.com/greg and uploads mpegs of his work. He releases it all under the Creative Commons Attribute license. The UCLA film school finds his technique amazing, and they add his work to their repository. This will bring some renown to Greg, so he's psyched. And because the Authena modules are already installed in Greg's Gallery, and the UCLA film school has an Authena-empowered repository at uclafilm.org, all they have to do is point it at the RDF/RSS feed at Greg's site. The UCLA Authena server modules read the CC licenses in the RSS feed on Greg's site, and seeing that they grant permissions to use the files as long as they cite Greg, the Authena module ports the film clips into UCLA's repository, preserving the CC licenses.

CMS Server Hosting UCLA Film Repository: Oscommerce/VVGallery with Authena or Netjuke with film modules and Authena

Independent game developers post their mods and original graphics on their own Postnuke sites at gamernuke.com. Many of them release their early work under CC licenses, to gain publicity. Opensourcegamer.org continually scans the RSS Authena feeds at gamernuke.com and several other gaming communities, downloading all the new mods and graphics released under CC licenses, so as to become a repository for public domain mods.

Unlike physical property, digital media can exist in multiple places at once. This suggests that the digital marketplaces of the future will have copies of the pristine originals residing on their servers. A creator may easily syndicate their film, music, or book to several marketplaces. Thus the OSCMS model of content and commerce syndication, wherein the creator uploads their content onto their personal CMS, generates versions including thumbnailed, watermarked, and pristine originals within a secured Authena directory, and syndicates it to multiple marketplaces. The creator may choose multiple niche marketplaces for their content, as well as huge, general marketplaces, such as an Ebay or Amazon for content, or public domain repositories. Rather than having their content pass through a centralized corporate structure, their content is distributed via a network of markets.

Authena is starting out as "a philosophy of creators' rights" inspired by the Open Source CMS renaissance. Should working paradigms be adopted, they may become standards. Many entities are attempting to develop DRM standards from the top down, whereas standards may have a better chance being built from the ground up. Thus a good place to begin is with simple implementations which add useful functionality to Open Source CMS systems. If enough authors, artists, musicians, photographers, and creators find it useful, then certain aspects may become standards.

Based on the RDF specification, the Dublin Core, and the Creative Commons licenses, Authena will strive to afford a full spectrum of rights definitions. Authena will seek a new paradigm of syndicated commerce and a new mechanism for distribution, whereby creators host their content on an Open Source CMS such as Postnuke, and syndicate it to any number of trusted marketplaces and repositories based on other CMS or Open Source commerce systems such as Oscommerce.

Dr. Elliot McGucken founded "the world's classical portal" at Classicals & jollyroger.com in 1995. He teaches physics at UNC Chapel Hill and works with the Center for The Public Domain. He recently launched Vvgallery.org and Athuena.org which is developing "A Philosophy of Creator's Rights," based on the marriage of digital rights definitions and management to Open Source CMS. He received a Merrill Lynch Innovations Grant for research on an artificial retina, and he has published a novel and a poetry collection. He runs mobynuke.net and pnavy.com, which offer free hosting for Open Source CMS including Postnuke, phpBB, and gallery.

Blake Watters is an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill. He works for ibiblio.org, and after participating in many open source projects, he is now the lead project administrator and benevolent dictator for the netjuke.sourceforge.net project.

Elliot McGucken, a part-time physics professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is just back from an open-source software conference -- the conference on Open Source Content Management, or OSCOM -- at Harvard. While there, McGucken, 33, and his colleague Blake Waters discussed Authena, an open-source program for artists, musicians, photographers and authors. Authena allows creative types to sell their work online while controlling their rights to the material. Connect's Christina Dyrness caught up with McGucken -- who also started the Web site www.jollyroger.com, which is devoted to classic books -- on the Chapel Hill campus and tried to get him to talk about Authena, which is a project sponsored by the Durham-based Center for the Public Domain.

A.It's about the application of open-source to the arts. And it also kind of ties into the rise of the artist hacker. Because when you look at the Linux operating system, it's all created by hackers.

A.It's a benevolent hacker. Someone who's just having fun programming. Not somebody who is breaking into government systems. I think that's the original definition.

But, basically, it has kind of progressed beyond people who just code [the programming languages] C and C++ to kind of easier languages such as PHP -- that's pre-hypertext processing; it's a common Web programming language. And built on that is what you call LAMP applications, and that stands for Linux, Apache [an open-source Web server], MySQL [an open-source database] and PHP. And the LAMP applications, most of them are for managing content.

A.Exactly. You have your PostNuke [open-source software with applications for managing Web sites], which includes galleries for instance. And message boards, discussion forums, you can put in a calendar, classifieds, you can stream media off of it. So then where Authena comes in is taking that and marrying a little bit of digital rights management to it. And then also integrating osCommerce , which is an e-commerce application, to the gallery. And all of a sudden, you have something you can upload your pictures to, define rights and sell them.

Q.How is this different than what else is out there in terms of digital rights management? Controlling rights to online content is a hot topic right now.

A.Basically, it's all open-source based. So all the applications are open source.

A.Right. It's the exact same paradigm, free software. They're all released under the GNU public license. So once you get it, you're free to look at all the code and change it, but you also inherit the original license, which means that all subsequent releases must also be free. So that's why these things grow in huge ways because so many people end up participating. But at the Harvard OSCOM conference, we said that Authena has kind of brought osCommerce into the fold. Basically what it does is allow you to manage media but also be compensated for it. In layperson's terms, if you're in a band or you're a photographer, you can basically, with a few clicks, install these applications and then sell your photographs or your music online.

Q.So if I'm a photographer and I want to build my own Web site, this is what I would use to do it?

A.Yes. VVGallery is the actual program. It stands for Vincent Van Gallery. ... [The vvgallery.org has many paintings by Van Gogh.]

A.It was last summer when I started thinking about it. And it was kind of around December or January when I did one of the first SourceForge projects for it, which was VVGallery.

A.SourceForge is kind of a collection of all the world's open-source projects. And there are thousands and thousands of them on there. And it's not just the collection, but it's also the mechanism by which people can go on and collaborate. So it's really, clean nice software. It allows you to assign bug fixes, it has discussion forums, it manages downloads and it allows other people to put in updates.

Q.So did you recruit other people to work on Authena or did people just find it through SourceForge?

A.There's a student at UNC working on it with me. Blake Waters, he works at Ibiblio [an online library run out of UNC-CH]. And at the Harvard conference we ran into the guys who are doing the Tiki project. They're integrating the Authena protocols into Tiki. And Tiki is an open-source content management system; it's one of the leading ones on SourceForge.

A.All types of media have three different versions. You have the pristine original, which is the big, glossy picture. And then you have a thumbnail, which is for browsing purposes. And then you can have a watermarked version, which is the pristine original, but with the watermarking across it.

A.First of all, it can convey the rights, who owns it, when it was taken, that kind of thing. But it also renders it useless for you to use in products, unless you pay to get rid of it. If you throw a watermarked image in a book, everyone knows where it comes from. So it makes it difficult to pirate or steal. And that extends to music. For instance, if you had a song, the thumbnail would be kind of a 10-second sound clip. And then the watermarked version is something that would have degraded quality or some kind of stamp that was written into the MP3. So basically the whole idea with Authena -- for example in VVGallery, you have the gallery, where you upload photos and it thumbnails them and everything, and then you have osCommerce where the photos exist and people can browse them, and then they can pay to download the pristine original.

A.The thing about Authena is that it's not written as a stand-alone application. It's written as a parallel application. The whole idea is to integrate it with all these different protocols, like Tiki. If you could picture a whole world where everybody could upload content to their own personal server and then they could choose marketplaces to sell it in. So if you're a band and you have a certain sound, there might be somebody running a record label using all of this software. So if you get an account there and hit the publish button, all of a sudden all of your content shows up in their e-commerce place. Then if it gets sold through there, you get compensated for it.

Q.This is a project sponsored by the Center for the Public Domain. How are they involved?

A.They pay my salary. They pay Blake. And they give us money to go to conferences.

A.(Laughs.) No. Never. It always goes in stages. It's kind of strange because open-source is always evolving and always moving forward. So it's just something you can see almost never being done. Of course there's a point where you can be done and then other people take over. It's a lot of fun. I've gotten some good feedback, like there's a guy in Singapore who has downloaded VVGallery and is using it.

Q.What do you get out of it? If Authena does well and a lot of people are using it; what's in it for you?

A.There's a bunch of different things. One is it's just fun working on the theoretical, academic points of it. I guess that's what I was trained to do in grad school. And then there's the possibility of also turning it into a business or something like that. And collaborating with people who use it for business purposes.

A.Yeah. I found out I never have to update it, because it's devoted to great books. That was a few years ago when I realized that, going "Wait, Shakespeare is still going to be a classic 20 years from now." It's also a great thing for the discussion forums. If you have a discussion forum for Eminem or Britney Spears, 10 years from now people might not care. But 100 years from now people are still going to be typing in "Was Hamlet insane?" And still nobody's going to know the answer.