Dear Internet: Plz to make opensource Uber

letwat.mkdn

Ok, so the TL;DR of Uber vs Taxis:

• Uber sucks for drivers, Uber basically cheats drivers of securities that they're legally entitled to to save money, getting in hot water with various governments legal systems.

• Uber kinda rips their employees a new one, taking a significant share of the profits, and subjecting their staff to basically slave labour conditions.

• But consumers love the convenience of the service esp with Phone interfaces, and consumers are assholes who don't really care about the drivers, because taxi's are annoying and inconvenient and poorly organised.

So whatever way you go, somebody gets screwed, and its basically boils down to "Corporations are why we cant' have nice things".

So: One weird trick to fix the money problem: We kill the Corporations.

It seems a lot of the biggest suck that Uber brings to the table is basically:

• Uber likes money
• Legal problems because Uber employs humans who also like money.
• But Uber likes money more.

In theory, if Uber ceases to be an "employer" of services, and becomes merely a transaction broker, similar to Ebay, where the "broker" does not directly take a profit from the "providers", and the "providers" are self regulating, and self employed, and set their own prices, then that removes the legal requirement for the "employer" in this equation ( now a "broker" ) to provide the people with cars any real services.

But this of course means: There's no real money in it for the broker.

If you're a corporation, he're you're going "oh, so this idea that would be very useful to people is not so useful to us, NEXT".

But Open Source DGAF.

And there's some other ways to make a revenue off such a service without effectively being scalping.

THE OS MODEL

Ok, Consider the essentials:

• Users have nice easy to use client on their phone that can summon some wheels from somewhere and help them pay for it.

• People with wheels enlist in this service, and state their prices to their "Driver" API. "People with wheels" can be Individuals, or companies like existing taxi services. This system shouldn't care. Wheels are wheels, and it doesn't matter how or who, all you're doing is:

1. Facilitating the client and the driver comming in contact
2. Providing a convenient way for the client and the driver to exchange moeny for services.

In fact, under the above scheme, somebody can state a price of "nothing" and still attract a passenger. There's no corporation having a cry over not making money from people going places.

Under the above scheme, if somebody wants to charge 1000$ an hour for a limo, they can do just that.

And how that actually pans out, who cares. Its just CraigsList but for getting places.

Everything on top of that is niceities.

Extra Nice things that could be useful ( and monetizable )

You can do ads... but ew. Really? ADs? BRO?

Instead, you can have teirs of drivers.

Certification systems.

Of course you're still going to have the "rating" system, but a professional evaluation and driver certification is much better.

So the base teir is of course "average joe who has a license and can take you places for a buck", but that guy sounds dodgy, you don't know how reliable he is. 5 stars! ... k... sounds legit.

Beyond we can have national specific qualifications programs. These should basically be equal to whatever the nations standard requirements for Taxi is, because well, this shit has to be legal.

All that happens is if you have attained such certifications, then you'd have to be able to prove evidence of such a certification, and we'll give you a big badge saying you have it. ( There might be some fees associated with processing this certifcation, or not, idk ).

And yes, this means "People who are working for taxi services can enlist and carry people as standard taxi fare". That is indeed, on purpose.

The idea is instead of trying to grab the industry by the balls and redefine it and violate all the laws, we be simply a catalyst to make existing resources easier for clients to access, and add social elements to the dynamic to make it more enjoyable and productive.

This way instead of a radical change, we can change the actual infrastructure the way we want to, by competing for the best employment model.

BLah blah blah

I could try doing this myself, but it would require effort, and I really hate android development.

So this is a free idea, and I don't really care if it sucks or not. If it doesn't suck, and you get this stuff from me, my name in the credits would be cool. But otherwise, just make things better and not more suck, that's all I ask for.