Solarpunk

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model.

That's... obviously incorrect? Most important software is open source that was made for free. Most data centers run on freeware. And even with mass consumer facing software like youtube browsers the best options are freeware like Revanced. In academia, the whole concept of academic tenure is based on the empirical proof that professors do their job best when they don't have any obligations and they can just get a basic income to do whatever.

The best way to organize the tech industry is to make copyright and patents illegal and to give everyone a universal basic income.

Yes, there’s steward-ownership and post-growth entrepreneurship:

• https://www.ted.com/talks/armin_steuernagel_transforming_ownership_to_create_a_better_economy
• https://purpose-economy.org/en/whats-steward-ownership/
• https://www.ted.com/talks/melanie_rieback_post_growth_entrepreneurship
• https://nonprofit.ventures/

I like the idea of a coop. Workers own everything, feast or starve based on their own success.

In addition to the other models people have mentioned, one I think that's an important and sometimes overlooked alternative to venture funding is a good-old-fashioned small business loan. Venture funding became super attractive to startups because it looks kinda like free money. If your startup fails, you don't have to pay it back, they take on the risk with you. However, if you succeed, they own you forever. And they are going to demand a huge return on their investment to pay for all the other ones that failed.

So in certain light, investment funding is kind of like a super predatory type of loan. With a traditional loan, you have fixed terms, you pay it back, then you're done with them. With equity investors, you're never rid of them, as you noted. They sell their piece onto someone else of their choosing, who demands you make them even more money, etc. When the startup period's over, if you're not making enough money, yeah technically you don't have to pay back the loan every quarter. But the investors will fire you and hire different management unless you lay off half your workforce, cut the quality of your product, and make a much bigger margin by next quarter.

Also, lenders can have different structures and we can improve those as well. Instead of traditional banks, they could be credit unions with particular community objectives. Local members deposit their savings, and vote on lending principles and goals, like prioritizing lending to local worker-owned co-ops in their geographic area, and/or lending to community land trusts to enable purchasing of more real estate away from asset-based markets, fund construction of new housing, etc.

Edit: Plus, a credit union could agree on how to handle cases in which the co-op/organization can't pay back their loan. How to re-negotiate terms, when to vote on forgiving the remainder of the loan (turning it into a community donation) potentially based on demonstrated non-monetary value delivered to the community, and how to distribute that loss among the depositors, etc. There might be options for depositors to opt their funds into riskier loans, or loans they're willing to turn into crowd-funded donations, maybe even loans with voluntary pay-back terms only (i.e. when the receiving organization can afford to pay it back, to enable more loans to good causes in the community), creating hybrid types of funding as well.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited.

And yet here we are, with the internet running mostly on free software, the amount of work put into the linux kernel exceeding anything Microsoft could do and open source LLMs being serious competitors to companies investing 10B+ USD in research.

Open source is the biggest and most successful demonstration of what is technically an anarcho-communist effort. Communist: there is a collective ownership of the means of production (the source code) and anarchist: it is developed in the absence of a coercive structure, anyone is free to make a fork.

Are there any hybrid business models for funding tech developments, that eg. even allow the developed tech to be open source?

Public funding. Why is it always forgotten in these discussions? The funding that got us computers, space rockets, internet, deep learning is actually far more important than the "silicon valley" funding style that more often than not means "slap a nice UI on a result coming from a public lab"

Places like Kickstarter and Patreon show that crowdfunding can be hugely successful. Sadly the incentives of these platforms don't align well with their customers, so people have grown a bit jaded with Kickstarters recently and Patreon mostly devolved into a winner takes all attention economy that leaves lesser known creators with scraps only.

But the general idea is not bad. An ethical platform like Kickstarter that vets projects a bit and only allows coops or so would probably work well if they can convince people that those are relatively safe bets.

Sadly the payment processing side of things is a legal minefield, which makes it really hard and potentially expensive to set up an alternative.

Not a concrete example like your asking for but the question has a lot of overlap with the third software freedom

There is the B-corp but I don’t know how successful. OpenAI’s structure seemed interesting but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to end up working out.

Mondragón is an interesting coop corpo in Spain. Co-ops do seem like a good choice.

For hardware it is relativly simple, as paying for that is normal. Raspberry Pi is a private company, but produces open source hardware. Probably the way to go, is to force all companies to do so. Right to repair is imho a good starting point.

For software the key seems to be large government or private customers. They do have a lot of money and the system not running costs them a lot. Hiring experts themself is also not always posdible. So buying in service from companies developing open source is an option.

For R&D a lot of that is done by universities and research institutions likr NASA today. That seems to me to be a good solution.

If anyone wants to learn about this process and enjoy it despite how horrible it is.Watch the show Silicon Valley, It does a good job explaining it all. And it's really funny.

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