Canithesis's Commitment to Ethical Business
There is a lot of hot debate in recent years surrounding the effects that profit-first models have had on end users in the software industry. Between online DRM, corporate abuse of community-run projects, and the increasing arbitrary influence of real-world politics. I am writing this quick Q&A to help outline what my goals are to keep the sailing smooth as we go forward.
Q: What prompted the founding of Canithesis?
A: As an archivist and open-source enthusiast, I was unhappy with the existing market that was becoming complacent with a "the publisher controls the product" mindset, and I want to change it. A lot of the things I loved fell victim to poor upper management and greedy penny pinching.
Video games were always traditionally half-released in binary form and made incredibly hard to preserve. Publishers eventually give up and move onto the next money printer. I'm a huge WipEout fan, but SCEI doesn't make those anymore (or anything cool, really). Bethesda almost did the same thing to Quake, were it not for John Carmack releasing all of the idTech source code up to version 4. When the money moves elsewhere, and fans aren't given the power they need, a game series dies and it's legacy entries are all that's left, rotting on old platforms and being duct-taped together desperately. I'm sure lots of gamers can relate and have had similar stories to tell about their favorites.
This is not exclusive to gaming. The entire computer business suffers from a disease. IBM just about controls the entire Unix ecosystem, which ruined GNOME, GIMP, Wayland, and dozens of other projects. And I could go on. It's time for something drastically different.
Q: What is Canithesis's preferred profit model?
A: We like things the old-fashioned way where we sell you one thing and you own it forever. This requires a commitment to quality and completeness. Shorter-term monetization strategies like subscription models can be great in select circumstances but are prone to user hostility. We believe that user trust leads to better long term success, so we're defaulting to the more straightforward strategy wherever it's viable.
Q: What is Canithesis's relation to open source?
The short answer:
The licenses we use will vary depending on the risk factor involved in releasing a particular product under that license. We will start with (hopefully unintrusive) proprietary licenses but move towards more free ones as releases become older and as Canithesis has more marketing leverage to thrive off of instead.
The long answer:
My goal is to, in the future, leverage Free Software as a mechanism to keep users in control of what they've bought, instead of under control from it. In return we kindly ask that you please pay for licenses to our software if you are able to.
Unfortunately, our early releases will still be proprietary for a limited period of time. There is sadly an increasing number of small shovelware publishers under fake names that recycle software from Git repositories or dump bytecode from projects and repackage them to sell for a quick cash grab, without any of the rights you ought to have. We are against DRM but we do need to take the minimum steps necessary to keep the boat afloat until we have enough brand recognition to survive off of word alone. Once we move past that threshold, I plan to liberate our commercial projects for good.
Giving users the right to modify your work and redistribute it is crucial to the survival of that work. Software is not only a tool but an artform, and in the context of video games specifically, "alternatives" are often not enough. Fans often dedicate years or decades to uncovering or restoring modifiable versions of their favorite games, constantly under the threat of litigation, and it's only fair to them that we make that work infinitely easier when it is possible to do so.
Q: Will Canithesis ever be publicly traded?
A: Never for as long as I am alive. I hate shareholders.
Q: Do you have any vague "code of conduct" policies I should be concerned about?
A: We're aware of the increasing use of ill-formed company policies used to silence competing ideas, infecting the maintainers of software lots of people rely on. We are happy to report we have no plans to do anything of the sort. The quality of the work is all that matters to us and I want to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Q: Do you contribute upstream to FOSS projects you use in your work?
A: Where possible and appropriate, yes. Some source code changes obviously are project-specific and can't be pushed upstream, but we also like to help in other ways. This is not exclusive to just our commercial projects but also whatever the employees feel like helping out with. For example, we provide a free mirror of the X11Libre project as we don't trust Microsoft not to nuke the XOrg forks from orbit.
In the future we also plan to publish some of our in-house development tools and libraries for free, such as level editors or conversion tools.
