Topic: Presentation

Co-ment^® tries to develop a fair trade in Web services. For a Web service delivering the functionality of a software tool, it means of course being free software-based and open as a service. But that’s not the whole answer, what about business models? How can a web service be fair to customers and more generally the public? How can it provide a sustainable contribution to the knowledge commons?

Just like other players, Sopinspace (the company developing and operating co-ment) searches for the answer by experimenting. For one-and-a-half year, we conducted a real-life experiment with co-ment 1. The new business model of co-ment 2 is the product of our assessment of this experiment and our vision of future commons-compatible markets. The business model is based on the combination of 3 channels:

• A free-of-charge service which is fully functional for people or groups who want to co-operate on a text (annotating, commenting, and drafting it) for a limited period of time, but that does not provide group management and perennial storage facilities nor a personalized support.
• A for-pay PRO service, which can be obtained on a per-month basis. The price of this service is tuned to reflect both costs and the need for continued investment in co-ment. There are special offers in particular for education users.
• Additional services for assistance to install, integration into information systems, securisation, grouped offers for large organization, development of additional functionality, etc.

This is open for comments.

Sopinspace is committed to become a model provider of free software-based open Web services. We have a demanding vision of what this means:

• All the functionality of co-ment^® lies in the COMT software that powers a co-ment worskpace. For access to the full source code, including server code, please check the community site. COMT is distributed under the GNU Affero GPL version 3 or any later version. Please be aware of the additional trademark clause reserving the usage of the co-ment trademark and check the trademark use regulation for permissions. Note that the commercial wrapper of the co-ment PRO service is not distributed, in contrast to what we did for an earlier version. In practice, including the commercial wrapper (which is nothing else that a Website) in the distributed code was complicating the installation of the software within one own’s IT infrastructure. Today, if you are a subscriber to the co-ment PRO service you get exactly the functionality provided by your co-ment workspace by installing the distributed code.
• All the data relevant to the workspace of a subscriber to the co-ment PRO service is stored in one separate database, that you can export for re-use in your own installation.
• You can also export individual texts and their comments to an open XML format, though we recognize that this format is not at the level of documentation and reusability that it should ideally have.