People hosting instances of CryptPad should read at least the Changes in CryptPad section

Thanks to Scott Alexander for some of the ethical foundations of this post.

You ever wonder why Open Source software always seems to be slightly harder to use and slightly buggier and slightly less polished than proprietary competitors?

How about this: Why is it that good people who want to make good things somehow end up making evil things for evil corporations which sell them to other good people who would (presumably) rather buy good things.

It's all about incentives

It's hard to talk about incentives without sounding like a miserly tool, but if we're going to hack ourselves out of a situation that nobody really wants to be in, we're going to need to understand them pretty well.

• Why is Open Source habitually 90% of the way there ?
• Why is Facebook more addictive than it is useful ?
• Why is it that when you get something for free, even from a well funded government program, it's reliably worse than something you buy?

It's all about incentives.

In a restaurant, you're the customer

I love going to restaurants. I have no car and few possessions so restaurants are the way I spend my income. Not only do I love food but I love the relationship which I have with restaurateurs. When I walk into a restaurant, I want to be fed delicious food and they want to be paid, not only that, they want me to be happy so I will return many times and bring my friends. I want them to be happy so they will give me bigger portions and maybe a little dessert on the house. Our incentives are aligned perfectly. We are practically a team.

In a soup kitchen, you're just a user

It is hard to deny the importance of soup kitchens to the fabric of society. Part of what makes us able to claim to be civilized is the fact that we don't let people simply die if they're down on their luck. Soup kitchens, however, are not restaurants. When you walk into a soup kitchen, you are generally greeted kindly but there is a subtle distinction from a restaurant, at a restaurant you're the customer and at a soup kitchen you're just a user. Many soup kitchens are organized around religious groups and evangelizing their belief is a significant part of their motivation, but even secular organizations are motivated by some sort of a higher calling.

Open Source is a soup kitchen

I've been developing Open Source both professionally and personally for 7 years and I'm going to tell you something that many Open Source developers won't admit. Open Source software is not made for you. Sometimes Open Source developers are motivated by the Free Software ideology and they imagine their code as transforming the world, sometimes they just want to solve some problem for themselves and they give away the resulting code. Open Source software is almost never developed for the simple purpose of making another person's life a little easier.

If you aren't the customer you're the product

This aphorism has become popular with the rise of ad-tech and social network websites. The phrase invokes an image of free services coming like free grain because you are, in fact, the pig on his way to slaughter. In some way this is true, Silicon Valley business models are becoming disturbingly like human farming.

However, the phrase also invokes an image of an evil entrepreneur plotting to enslave humanity by creating a slick social network. If 1 in 1000 companies is successful then logic implies there must be thousands of evil entrepreneurs running around everywhere. If this is true then where are all of the failed evil plotters? I've never met an entrepreneur who was anything less than an aspiring saint.

I think the real reason why social networks become human farms is because people don't want to pay for development of web services and stuck between a successful human farm and a failing soup kitchen, entrepreneurs begrudgingly choose to farm.

Breaking out

If we're ever going to stop living in a world of farms and soup kitchens, we're going to need to get serious about incentives. Part of my intention in starting the CryptPad project is to build something that is not a farm nor a soup kitchen. I want to have a mutually beneficial relationship with every one of CryptPad's users, including you. I don't want to be a charity worker beholden to an NGO or a post office clerk drawing a paycheck from the state. I want you to be my boss, I want to obsess about making your life better, I want fair exchange of value and aligned incentives.

Changes in CryptPad

As you may already know, cryptpad.fr now limits your data storage and allows you to buy an account which will raise that limit. The code for limits and accounts is also in the CryptPad codebase and turned on by default. If you are installing CryptPad, you have three choices.

1. Leave it exactly as it is: People will be limited to 50MB of storage and they will see a Support CryptPad button. In the development time this donated money buys, we will pay special consideration to the needs of CryptPad admins like you.
2. Share the revenue: If you specify some configuration parameters and send us an email, the donation button will become an Upgrade Account button, allowing them to take a plan with additional storage quota. When people upgrade their account on your server, we will credit you 50% of the revenue earned. This helps us pay the cost of development and helps you pay the cost of hosting.
3. Disable the donate button: If you do this, we hope you will help CryptPad in some other way such as by taking an on-premises support contract.

If you run a public CryptPad instance, please don't increase the 50MB per user storage limit. This limit is what makes people subscribe and what pays for CryptPad development. Running a CryptPad instance which offers a "better deal" is effectively using the project against itself.

Finally, new versions of CryptPad always check for new or expired accounts from our account server. We have added a parameter called adminEmail which will be sent along with the domain and version of CryptPad you're running. This way we can notify you if we're aware of any a serious problems with your CryptPad instance. We take your privacy seriously and will never sell your email or send you marketing spam. If, however, you want to keep your CryptPad instance completely hidden from us, you can set this parameter to false and it will never query the account server.

Coming next

Our objective is to help you collaborate, stay organized and get things done faster and easier. We want to provide maximum value to you and we want you to provide value to us so that we can continue doing it. As was said in the previous post, the big issues which we are planning to tackle soon are:

• File upload for PDF and image embedding
• Text coloring based on the authors of the document
• Workgroups for team collaboration
• Zero Knowledge spreadsheets

As always, we will be continuing to put great effort into understanding your problems, how you go about solving them, and how we can make little changes to make CryptPad fit your needs better.

Caleb