Two examples creating ethical Mobile OS alternatives I often mention:
Purism
Purism is an example of a for-profit company that is designing a smartphone from the ground up - hardware and driver software, firmware - to run an open OS (any Linux flavour). Their focus is security and privacy and their shareholders are their customers. From Our Story:
Purism is invested in creating an ethical computing environment, with quality services and products that people will find convenient to use and beautiful to look upon. An environment you can reliably trust.
As a social purpose company, we can prioritize our principles over profit. Our mission to provide freedom, privacy, and security will always come first above all else. You see, you are our primary shareholder.
There is more information in Why Purism?. From their FAQ: Purism is for-profit, but as a Social Purpose Corporation.
e.foundation
/e/ is a non-profit, open-source project creating an ethical, privacy-first alternative for Google’s Android. They are non-profit, but can nonetheless find enough funding to develop their software with sufficient speed.
There is a lot of interest in this OS (also because of good marketing, keeping the community involved during development). So, this is not the for-profit company you envision, but can still get a lot of uptake if they make the install process really easy. But …
This is not my experience. I think we should be wary of confirmation bias here. We are in circles here, where people care about privacy and are willing to act. Our filter bubbles are tuned to it. In tech world people are much more aware of what is at stake. And even here people keep using the tech giant’s products and services (see also Aral Balkan’s article in I was wrong about Google and Facebook: There is nothing wrong with them).
Indienet
Aral Balkan, btw, is the author of the Ethical Design Manifesto and behind the Indienet initiative (Indie stands for independent, and independent alternatives in the tech world). You could view Indienet as a movement that lays the groundwork for ethical businesses to operate on.
Whenever possible we use and develop decentralised, federated, interoperable initiatives to encourage individual sovereignty and a healthy commons.
The ideas that Aral and like-minded developers and entrepreneurs are promoting are becoming quite popular in certain circles (e.g. with FLOSS developers and on The Fediverse). But this can easily slip your attention if you are in the ‘common tech world’. Aral is very principled on the ethical aspects and rejects using unethical technologies and the practices of surveillance capitalism.
I do not think that Zebra businesses are necessarily ‘loser companies’. Of course, they are tiny Davids agains Big Tech Goliaths. But their objectives are to be sustainable, i.e. make enough revenue to pay decent worker’s salaries and invest in development in ways that remain viable in the long run.
However, a Zebra on its own - when competing directly with a tech giant - is hugely disadvantaged (I will post about MeWe later, which may be in this position). Our current tech giants are effectively dominating oligopolies and they are retaining much of their market share by vendor lock-in (walled gardens) and network effects (leading to FOMO). They are cutting costs and maximizing profits, throwing ethics in the bin.
Where Zebra’s can compete is on true quality of service, intrinsic quality where the customers are the actual users: Us!
By focusing on quality and actual benefit of features as USP’s there is no need to draw up walled gardens, and instead do the opposite to gain yet another important unique selling point: Striving for Openness! I think here lies the key to competing with Big Tech. By being open and transparent, ethical, you gain trust with consumers, and by having open API’s and data format, based on open standards, you have created the preconditions to cooperate in ways that transcend your own business (or platform cooperative). You can find strength in numbers, where each business is not huge, but excels in a certain niche and connects to other businesses that excel in other niches.
The Fediverse
A good example of the opportunities that come from working in the open, is the Fediverse. It is called like this, because it is decentralized, consisting of federated servers that interconnect to form a greater whole. One of the dominating standards on which the Fediverse is based, is W3C ActivityPub for defining social networks. But there are other successful standards in this realm (not only federated, but also peer-to-peer with no 3rd-party server dependence).
Currently all projects and businesses on the fediverse are converging towards each other, making the network stronger. And there are hundreds of projects in the works that interconnect with it. Most well-known is Mastodon (Twitter alternative), but providing similar service is e.g. Pleroma. There is PeerTube (YouTube alternative) and PixelFed (Instagram alternative). See also watchlist for activitypub apps.
We used to have good standards bodies like W3C and OASIS and others, but these have been diminished in importance by the brunt force of the tech giants (like Google) pushing their own de-facto standards and then monopolizing them.
The evolution of the Fediverse and its standards, are much more organical (and hence messy), but they are people-driven not enterprise-driven, and gaining strength.
This will always continue to be a challenge, of course, when big $$$ lures. But setting the right preconditions will certainly help keep a business on track. Operating on principles of:
- Alternative (non-VC) funding models
- Transparency & Openness
- Immersed with proper Ethics
- Strength in cooperation, people-driven, people-focused, cooperatives (people-controlled)
With these principles firmly in place we don’t need to have ‘enterprises’ to compete with the giants.