Jason Murphy

Cambrian House and Why They Matter

Jul 11, 2006 Open Source

You may or may not have heard about Cambrian House by now, but if you haven’t you will pretty soon. They are truly making foolery out of existing business models and creating the first true paid-open-source community. We’re not talking Wordpress or RedHat here where corporate identities form around open source projects. What we’re talking about is a large community sharing ideas and creating products, with everyone taking a cut equal to the effort they put into it.

How Cambrian House Works: You sign up for their community. Then you from there you can submit ideas for new projects or you can contribute to existing projects. Depending on the amount of work you put in (code, design, copywriting, etc), you earn royalty points. These royalty points are essentially your shares of the entire product. If the product was your idea, you get a pretty large share of royalty points. If you just submitted a logo or some copywriting, you’ll get a smaller piece but it still all ads up. As long as you remain a member of the community, you’ll receive “royalty” checks that are a percentage of the profits equal to your percentage of the total project.

This is a BRILLIANT idea and gets a GENIOUS (yes, with an “O”) award. I just signed up and can’t wait to see how I might contribute. I don’t see myself contributing to many ideas, unless they are ones that I don’t really lan on doing anything with. But I don’t mind throwing in help on projects where I can.