Storj Labs Offers Unique Model for Cloud Storage

Storj Labs launched an open source partner program that will divert revenues from its unique decentralized cloud storage platform to companies and individuals willing to house data on their computing systems. Storj Labs Executive Chairman and Interim CEO Ben Golub told attendees during a keynote address at the recent Open Source Summit event that this model will help drive economic growth and innovation in the open source space. It’s also an aggressive step toward monetizing and diversifying the cloud storage space. The former Docker Inc. CEO said this model is different from current cloud storage providers like Google that are giving away their service as a loss-leader for their infrastructure services. “Not to castigate anybody, but how much better can we be if an open source community could directly benefit from that,” Golub said. The Storj Open Source Partner Program allows open source projects to generate revenue when their users store data using the Storj platform. The program launched with 10 partners, including Confluent, Couchbase, FileZilla, InfluxData, MariaDB, Minio, MongoDB, Nextcloud, Pydio, and Zenko. Program partners will receive a cut of the revenue when end-users of their software store data on the Storj platform. Partners will receive payments each month as long as that data is stored on the Storj platform. The program also allows partners to generate revenue if an existing Storj user deploys a partner’s open source software. That revenue will be tied to incremental storage and bandwidth usage. The program is currently being beta tested.  Shawn Wilkinson, founder and chief strategy officer at Storj Labs, said the company planned to open the private beta test to developers and its “farmers” by the end of the year. “Farmers” are the people or organizations that are offering storage access on their own machines.