"An open company differs from an open source project in that an open company is a formal legal entity, and needn’t be about software."
The set of employees of an open company is much, much smaller than the set of people working on whatever-it-is that the open company nominally "owns"--really it's a commons. The only reason to have employees at all is to formalize access to private data such as passwords and private user data.
Gittip, for example, has one employee, me. If you counted up everyone who has weighed in on GitHub we'd have maybe 20 or 30 community participants by now? Many more depending on how you draw the lines.
If I understand you right, the "requirements" would apply to the small set of people with access to private data, not to the majority participating in building whatever-it-is together.
Wouldn't this be pretty much like MediaWiki, prior to it having paid employees, or other non-profit foundations?
I'm actually not clear why this is a company instead of a non-profit foundation. It says:
"An open company differs from a non-profit organization in that an open company does not itself accept donations, and it does not compensate its employees. From the open company’s point of view, whether and how its employees receive money and for what, is undefined."
A non-profit can also not accept donations and not compensate employees, so the only thing that differs might be how employees receive money, which I don't really understand here.
I guess my confusion stems from the attractiveness of being an employee of this company. It sounds like these employees will be resolving customer support issues, since they need access to private account information, and they will be legally liable for their use of this private information, since their access is made public. Why would someone agree to do this kind of work without any compensation? How long will these employees stick around? What kind of vetting system could possibly ensure the integrity of these people with access to my account info?
Years ago, I spent a lot of time providing free Mac support on IRC, back when Dalnet was busy. Occasionally there were issues that took a huge amount of effort to resolve; in one of the few cases I still remember, I learned enough Cocoa to answer a newbie programmer's question. There was a small but dedicated group that all did the same thing, and other channels on other networks full of volunteers doing the same.
StackExchange is a huge network of volunteers helping to answer other people's questions, for no (real) compensation.
They might not be fun for you, but I think there are plenty of people that just like to help other people.
"An open company differs from an open source project in that an open company is a formal legal entity, and needn’t be about software."
The set of employees of an open company is much, much smaller than the set of people working on whatever-it-is that the open company nominally "owns"--really it's a commons. The only reason to have employees at all is to formalize access to private data such as passwords and private user data.
Gittip, for example, has one employee, me. If you counted up everyone who has weighed in on GitHub we'd have maybe 20 or 30 community participants by now? Many more depending on how you draw the lines.
If I understand you right, the "requirements" would apply to the small set of people with access to private data, not to the majority participating in building whatever-it-is together.