ENVIENTA: A non-profit community or a profit-oriented company?

ENVIENTA: A non-profit community or a profit-oriented company?

Those who follow the activities of the ENVIENTA project know well that the team is working with great forces on raising capital. ICO, startup and similar expressions fly around, meanwhile a lot of people think that ENVIENTA is a kind of non-profit community project venturing to change the world. This duality may be confusing for many people, that is why we would like to make things clear in this article.

To begin with, we can state that ENVIENTA started off as a community project and it is always going to remain that. It is working upon principles which do not allow other ways. The goal of ENVIENTA is to boost innovation by linking the people (inventors, manufacturers, investors, consumers, etc.) who participate and to facilitate their collaborations. In order to make it a reality, we must provide free access to knowledge. That is why our slogan is „opensource everything”.

For those who have read our latest article about the ENVIENTA Platform, it is clear that the system is decentralized and is owned by the community. The projects available on the platform are not the property of ENVIENTA, the blueprints are accessible to everyone. From this perspective ENVIENTA is a non-profit organization, the innovations are protected by a foundation from a legal point of view.

The story could come to an end here and we could try to run the organization from donations, but achieving the goals set by ENVIENTA requires much more…

That is why we decided to create ENVIENTA Ltd., which would provide profit-oriented services over the ENVIENTA Platform in such a way that would not violate the basic principles of ENVIENTA.

This model is not unusual, moreover it is quite common in the open-source world. For example WordPress follow a similar model, where the CMS system is a public domain, but its developer company, the Automattic lives on operation and support, paying a salary to the developers. Of course there are some well fuctioning non-profit projects (for example WikiPedia), but commercially sustainable projects are way more efficient.

The revenues serve as a continuous source for further developments and for the propagation of the system. The financing of these essential activities will be covered by the ENVIENTA Ltd., which will run the marketplace and the crowdfunding system, and it will also provide other optional services to the members of the platform. We think that such a company can cover the development costs and also can acquire competitive profit.

It is very important to see that the ENVIENTA Ltd. is working independently from the ENVIENTA foundation and community. It owns neither the plans nor anything that is part of the platform. If ENVIENTA Ltd. ceased to exist, the platform and the community would carry on the same way, since ENVIENTA is not a company. The ENVIENTA are You and Us. ENVIENTA is a community! It started as a community and it is always going to remain that…