At the Linux Foundation‘s Open Source Summit in Vancouver, Storj Labs a leader in decentralized cloud storage company, launched their ‘Open Source Partner Program’. This program will enable open-source projects to generate revenue when their users store data in the cloud.
The program was launched with the aim to bridge the “major economic disconnect between the 24-million total open-source developers and the $180 billion cloud market” as stated by Ben Golub, Storj’s executive chairman and interim CEO.
How does the Open Source Partner program work?
Open-source projects simply need to integrate Storj into their existing cloud application infrastructure. Since Storj uses an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 compliant interface, this integration should be easy.
Storj provides a blockchain encrypted, distributed cloud storage with facilitates data security, improves reliability, and enhances performance when compared to traditional cloud storage approaches. Using client-side encryption ensures that data can only be accessed by the data owners. While harvesting all these benefits, open-source projects that will use the Storj network will be provided with a continuous revenue stream. 60% of its gross revenue will be given to its storage farmers and 40% will be split amongst open-source developers.
Through simple Storj data connectors that will be integrated with their platforms, Storj can track data storage usage. Partners will be given help desk support and tools to test the network’s performance and capabilities.
What’s in it for open source companies?
Monetization has always been a challenge for open source companies. They ultimately require revenue to sustain themselves. Open source drives a sizable majority of the $200 billion-plus cloud computing market which is inversely proportional to the revenue that currently makes its way directly back to their projects and companies.
The ‘Open Source Partner Program’ will help open source companies to grow exponentially and meet other financial-related goals. Ultimately, open source companies – even the ones that only provide free products – require revenue to sustain themselves, and the Storj Open Source Partner Program aims to help.
What’s in it for Storj?
While this revenue generation program will benefit open source companies, it can also be viewed as an effective marketing strategy for Storj. Open source projects are all the rage these days and the more these companies turn to Storj for decentralized cloud-based solutions, the more popularity and recognition Storj gets.
Storj, as well as open source companies, realize the importance of openness, decentralization, and broad-based individual empowerment, which is why this program strikes the perfect balance to support open source projects.
The Storj Labs has already won over ten major open-source partners, including Confluent, Couchbase, FileZilla, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Nextcloud, to join its Open Source Partner Program. These partners will be given early, immediate access to the V3 network private alpha.
You can get a complete overview of the program on Storj’s blog post.
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