That's because they're buying growth. Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that.
My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.
> Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that.
How do you calculate this? Sure if you were just you with car, you could - but not sure this is exactly a workable business model without uber - if it was then people would presumably not use uber.
> My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.
You could have open source versions - but the source code is a small part of the operation - and I'm not sure why I would want to government to run it - or why people should not be allowed to profit from it. If the issue is that workers are being exploiter maybe a better option is to see if there is some reasonable regulation to be put in place or why there is such low demand relative to the supply of labour.
> How do you calculate this? Sure if you were just you with car, you could - but not sure this is exactly a workable business model without uber - if it was then people would presumably not use uber.
I'm not a 100% sure if I understand your question. What I meant was that you could run a marketplace web service like uber or airbnb for way less than they're spending now. The variable costs of processing those transactions approach 0 at scale, also would be practically free if someone wanted to host it themselves for their small town.
> You could have open source versions - but the source code is a small part of the operation - and I'm not sure why I would want to government to run it - or why people should not be allowed to profit from it. If the issue is that workers are being exploiter maybe a better option is to see if there is some reasonable regulation to be put in place or why there is such low demand relative to the supply of labour.
Yeah I agree. The OP asked about a good open source alternative and I think that this could work as an open source project and be deployed per town (or as a decentralized application).
