Jason Kincaid is currently working as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later moved to Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in "society and genetics". You can contact him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (it has other addresses too, so don't worry if you have another). ? Read More
If you are a developer, there's a good chance you have a handful of — or more — projects. Things to tinker with evenings and weekends and can download at GitHub, but that you have never seriously considered releasing Wild as a separate service. Not because you think they are bad, but because they are a lot of work to maintain — and you still have this day job to worry about.
Bushido, Y Combinator startup, which made its debut last week at demo day, wants to give developers a hand: they make it super simple to take this app and put it online for other users to sign up for — and maybe even make some money from him in the process.
The problem, explains the Bushido co-founder Shawn Grove, is the process of converting these open projects usable services, authentication and payments, what many developers do not want to deal with. so instead of having to disclose them to the masses, they sit at their GitHub repository without getting much attention.
Bushido looks to fix it by passing the developers everything they need to get their app and run. At this point, the service supports Rails application (it offers Bushido Ruby Gems), and there is a simple API to quickly integrate user authentication, payments and other common traits. Bushido is also home to the project, so developers don't need to worry about paying for AWS or other services. In turn, Bushido takes 15-40% profit of each application (the percentage you pay goes down more your application receives as economies of scale kick in).
To start the service allows users to deploy is open source applications like CRM and CMS FatFree diesel locomotive, and more apps will be coming as developers to add them to the service.
Bushido also has some much more ambitious goals than just simplifying things for developers — they also want to serve as a centralized database to authenticate as a user and data for open source applications. In other words they want to become Web layer that allows applications to communicate.
Right now, if you sign up for the Bushido powered app, you will create a login to Bushido work on all other applications running on the platform. This helps reduce the barrier to entry, so users can quickly start using the new application. And, if the data is stored in a consistent manner, even you can access the same data between different applications.
Of course, this approach will not appeal to everyone. Bushido is going to monitor both the users and your data, and at this point, it has no export feature. Grove said it will be coming, and that at the time of startup expects to win the trust of developers (Grove and the rest of the team are open source developers, so they have a good idea to concern are).
Another possible problem: some developers may not like Bushido SSO approach because it makes it easy to hop competitor app. Grove recognizes this also, but said he would be a good challenge for them and adds that, in General, open source developers prefer to compete on the merits in comparison with the lock. It also sounds as if this becomes a big enough problem, Bushido consider making some changes.
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