How do you feel about non-profit startups developing pure Open Source software and services in exchange for donations, in the interests of bettering the ecosystem itself? Could a nascent Mozilla be a YC nonprofit?
www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/
The question of whether open-source producing non-profits fit into YC is still a good one. I couldn't find an info on whether they have already accepted such non-profits, but the incubator Fast Forward has:
> Intelehealth built an open-source intelligence engine for assessing primary care conditions
https://qz.com/792685/silicon-valley-wants-to-save-the-world...
(Obviously, a clone itself wouldn't suffice, you'd need to start with federated identity, and....)
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/diaspora#/entity
It didn't work out so well, mostly because a.) actually cloning Facebook is pretty hard and b.) users don't seem to want to switch to fully-open Facebook or Twitter clones.
I'm making a strong bet that people do want to switch to fully-open social clones, because it's hard for me to imagine citizens of 2024 or 2028 conducting an effective political system using today's monolithic social technology. But the current ecosystem sucks for it.
The Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned for commercial entity, the Mozilla Corporation.
[1] If there was a nascent non-profit in the chain that led to Mozilla, it would be NCSA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercompu...] where Andreesen was developing Mosaic.
Everyone has to pay for marketing, and I'll give you the part about growth.
But is this because something inherent in a nonprofit stops it from growing? Is it that there are fewer nonprofits to sample wins from? Or is that venture capital is simply not structured to consider the upside of funding anything other than a bet on a huge exit?
Thinking a bit more, big software related non-profits appear to be spin-offs from industry (Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation) or academia (Apache Foundation also from NCSA). In each case, the software came first as was the case with Mozilla and the funding followed because corporations found they had an interest in the software's continued development.
On the other hand, OpenAI might be a counter example where the money is coming to support research so that's a possible case where YC has funded a 'non-profit' at scale...though the model was recruitment rather than application.
If I'm trying to write open source outside the confines of traditional capitalism, the last thing I want to do is require that people's usage of it is proportional to their riches.