Why we did it this way

We'd have used open source if it paid for itself

The first plan was to put Kanecta out under MIT and let it go. We like open source. But Kanecta isn't a small library — it's a file browser, calendar, email client, board, terminal and database in one. Software that broad needs real, ongoing money to be good. You can see the gap anywhere a funded tool and a volunteer one do the same job.

A price of zero leaves two ways to pay

When software is free to everyone for any purpose, the work gets paid for in one of two ways:

• Volunteers, in their spare time, out of love. Admirable, and getting harder every year.
• Companies, because it serves their business. Generous, often — but a company has to act in its own interest. That's not a criticism; it's what directors are legally required to do. So whoever pays ends up deciding.

And volunteer time is no longer enough to keep big software secure. Each new AI model can find bugs in a large codebase faster than ever, and only paid teams can keep up. The input used to be time. Now it's money.

A little from a lot

You can't take a little from a lot, so you have to take a lot from a few.

That's how software usually gets funded, and it's why the few end up in charge. A million-dollar product with a million users costs a dollar each — or a million from one company, or a hundred thousand from ten. Every option except "a little from everyone" hands control to whoever paid.

So we changed one thing. Everyone who uses Kanecta is a member, and members pay a little or declare hardship. Then the people who fund it are the people who own it, and the money and the say come in through the same door — a door that lets in one person at a time.

And we made it impossible to sell

Co-operatives have been sold to venture capital before. We built Kanecta's structure so that can't happen: the code sits in a trust that can't sell it, can't profit from it, and can't stop anyone forking it. Nobody holds a special power — including us. If someone did capture the trust, they'd find there's nothing in it worth having.

The security isn't the lock on the door. It's that the room is empty.

Letting go

For a long time the instinct was to keep control, so nothing bad could happen to it. In the end it's the other way round: the structure keeps it good, not any one person's hand on the wheel. If Kanecta succeeds, the people who started it will be a small minority of its owners. That's the point.

The test we use

Would we be happy if a thousand people found Kanecta amazing and built a community around it — rather than a billion downloads with companies repackaging it? Yes. When a decision is hard, that's the question that settles it.