An open letter on side projects
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I agree with the core idea of this quote: don't take people's money and run away, especially if you led them to believe you will support a paid product for a long time.
However, I wouldn't say that supporting every paid product you make is a moral obligation. Just because a couple of people paid you $20 doesn't mean you should force yourself to spend your valuable time improving and maintaining the product if you no longer benefit (through joy or money). Certainly, you shouldn't defraud people and lead them to believe you will maintain a product for a long time, but this kind of blanket statement might scare away people from trying to create a paid service because of the fear of having to perpetually support a handful of users.
Again, I agree with the principle in particular cases, but there are cases where it doesn't apply (at least in my opinion).
Looks reasonable to me.
Does the customer that paid a single fee once have the right to claim a share of your time on perpetuity so you can keep maintaining it? Or is it fair to change your business model so you charge yearly fees for support/maintenance?
What if most customers don't want to pay the yearly subscription fee but a handful of them do? Are you still morally obligated to support them, even if their money barely cover costs?
Personally, I think it's fair to change your business model in any way that won't deceive your clients. Asking for a subscription and not maintaining the product will deceive them.
Is every one of your former employers entitled to free support because they once paid your salary? No, I did not think so.
But yeah, if I sold them something and promised unlimited support, they would be.
Listen, its extremely clear: If you don't want to act like an adult and support the stuff you're charging money for, then don't charge money for it. Don't hide behind this bullshit of "it's a side project!" It's not. It becomes a real project the second you charge money for it.
That you may eventually have to pay for those liabilities with a few hours of your time here and there does not absolve you of the agreement that you wilfully entered into in order to obtain those benefits. That risk was in large part what you were paid for.
If you're going to gamble, yeah. Sometimes you lose.
Mind you, this whole thought experiment is a bit silly. If you're going to form this sort of agreement, then you should define equitable exit conditions to manage risk in the event that you're dramatically wrong. At the very least, I'd want a significant portion of my money back if I paid for 'forever' (not decidable, so that might not even be a legal contract depending on your jurisdiction) and got a couple of years.
I agree that candid people may make binding promises that they were in no position to fulfill, sometime not even noticing. And I agree they have to pay for that mistake. However, you cannot force them to derail their lives for it.
There are bankruptcy laws for people who over spend money, so they can cut their looses and not end up being debt slaves for the rest of their lives. And the lenders who are foolish enough to give money to someone who is obviously not solvent to pay back are at least partially responsible. Why should it be different for creative works?
Bankruptcy protection (much abused at that) is generally only available to people or companies who have exhausted their financial resources in an attempt to meet their obligations. It is not a protection that is available to people who simply cannot be bothered to put in an effort out of a plentiful account to meet the obligations that they have taken upon themselves.
It is similar for creative works. If you attempt to keep something updated, make a reasonable effort to do so, and that simply becomes infeasibly expensive to continue doing without suffering some form of serious ruin, then that's fair enough. You made a reasonable attempt to meet your obligations, were wrong in your estimation of them, and being wrong shouldn't cost you everything you have. You didn't deal with your customer in, for lack of a better term, "bad faith" when you formed the implicit and/or declared contract upon which your deal wrested.
Mistakes happen, people should attempt to ameliorate the consequences of that mistake to a reasonable amount in order to meet the obligations that they have taken upon themselves and keep the strength and value of their word, their ability to make commitments to others in the world, high.
That is, I feel, different from simply deciding that one is not going to make a profit out of an obligation that they have taken upon themselves. And the strength of one's word is reflected in how much one will suffer in order to keep the obligations that one has formed. As is the value of any deal that someone might make with someone in the future. Someone's word is worth nothing when it is kept only in so far as it benefits them to keep it, and broken the next moment. I am unlikely to pay someone any sum of money, and would certainly not suffer them as an employee, if their attitude to their word, and the impressions that people could reasonably be expected to take away from what they said – the deals they made – was that they simply stopped trying to keep it the minute it ceased to be to their benefit to do so.
Most people do not act in that manner, if they did the strength of someone's word would be almost meaningless and no deals would be made since the client could never expect to benefit from them.
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As for the idea of selling something "as is", contract law is not that simple. If it were, then outside of situations in which both parties had significant forms of leverage, all goods and services would be exchanged only on an "as is" basis. We would find ourselves in a situation similar to the one that used to concern rail travel: in which terms and conditions absolutely removing any responsibility that the rail company had towards their passengers safety were found on the back of rail tickets. Insofar as one desires to be able to form valuable contracts, to trade things of value, one should desire to live in a system that enforces a certain lower bounds upon the behaviour of parties, and the equability of contracts that can be formed, within that system.
Consequently, while I don't pretend to understand it anywhere near entirely, there will almost doubtless be limitations on the disclaimers that you can place on various implied warranties (though this depends upon the relative jurisdictions governing the contract at the time it's formed.) If one were relying on writing, "as is" on a piece of paper, and getting the client to sign it, as a means to escape their obligation with regards to their client's statutory rights, I would not much care for their chances.
Most notably, as a matter of general principle, (and here we run into a problem, for the law may be different where you are,) it tends to be the case that one cannot form a contract entirely for one's own benefit. That is a contract, to be valid, must be equitable. A contract to the effect of "you shall give me your money, and in return I have no obligation to provide a good or service to you." Is clearly almost entirely, if not outright, to your benefit – and certainly of little to no benefit to your "customers" who in return for their money have no entitlement to any benefits nor access to reasonable redress in the even that they are denied something that you knowingly allowed them to form the impression they would receive. Likewise, contracts generally have to be decidable, that is to say that I cannot form a contract with you that goes something to the effect of, "as long as I want" or "as long as it is to my benefit." It simply does not matter what you choose to put in the contract if the contract itself is void, or voidable due to abuse of certain principles enshrined in the underlying statutes or common law that allow the formation of contracts to take place.
Of course, if one buys a used car from a shady salesman, one has little hope of redress through the courts when it turns out that one was not being dealt with in good faith. That has more to do with the difficulty of making law apply to them, then it does a matter of principle or of justice. It strikes me that apps, for smart phones, (distinguished because Microsoft seems to be calling desktop programs apps these days,) bear significant similarities to the shady used-car salesman model. That strikes me as neither a moral nor a legal argument though - it strikes me more as an 'I can get away with it' argument.
I have this commitment to myself: when I contract with customers, I will give them realistic SLAs as part of the deal; I will promise I will take care of them within that SLA.
> There is, however, a scenario where leaving a side project to die is not okay: when you make money from it. Whether you sell it as a service or a product, the moment you accept any form of obligatory payment for your side project, there is a fundamental obligation you have to maintain it.
I do not agree with this. Just because you make money of something doesn't make you have a obligation to maintain it. Who are you to decide this? If my side project happens to be good enough that I can charge for it and some people pay, doesn't mean I want to maintain it for the rest of my life. Once I'm bored of it or feel I want time for other side projects, I'll stop maintaining it. Because I can't maintain everything.
Seems like the authors problem is that he assumed that side projects are solid projects that will be there forever and he payed for that assumption. Rather, research what you are paying for, before you make the payment. And if there is a real interest for the people behind it to maintain it, and they communicate that they will be around, THEN it's a bad thing to just drop it.
is that if he sold a bicycle on Craiglist, it would be "immoral" to just offer it as-is and never see it again.
The fifty dollar deal would include free chain lubrication, brake pad changes and flat tire fixes for 18 months.
Nutjob.
If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your apartment?
It most certainly is a dick move if you know you have customers who depend on the service. To avoid being a dick, provide your users more notice.
> If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your apartment?
Of course you don't, but to avoid being a dick, provide adequate notice, with adequete being enough time to find a replacement. If I had a party on the 2nd day of month 3 with an expectation you'd be cleaning the apartment on day 1 only to be told on the 1st that you wouldn't be doing it, that would be a dick move.
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Essentially it comes down to providing enough notice to find a replacement. The time needed to do that obviously depends on the service, but I can think of many cases where a months notice is less than acceptable.
Of course, if we're talking "real" projects/services, it's different. But now we're talking about side projects. Something you do on the side.
I'm not against letting your users know that you're shutting down with a good amount of time before. What I'm against is that someone saying (the linked blogpost for example) that I HAVE TO maintain my side project because someone decided to depend on it.
You may think it's naive for someone to rely on your side project, but from their perspective they may never have known it was a side project. It may just look like a normal legitimate paid service, with a reasonable expectation of duty of care.
A consequence of the plethora of great dev tools/services out there is that it's relatively easy to produce a professional looking website, and thus increasingly difficult to tell whether said site represents a business or a side project (especially with wannabe start-ups, who commonly promote and advertise MVP services with landing pages only to pivot soon after). There should be some accountability for properly 'cleaning up/closing up' a business.
I don't think the OP said anything about having to maintain in perpetuity - just that there is an implicit social contract (and sometimes legal) to clean up a side project with due care when you take money.
In an ideal world, there would always be some care - but realistically speaking, the most appropriate line in the sand is paid/free.
"I'm not against letting your users know that you're shutting down with a good amount of time before. What I'm against is that someone saying (the linked blogpost for example) that I HAVE TO maintain my side project because someone decided to depend on it."
No. It stopped being a side project, and became a real project the second you started taking money for it.
I disagree. The key factor is not the money, but the promise (whether expressly stated or obviously implied). I'm 1000x more upset about a "free forever" service balking than an app politely going dark or charging for a major version upgrade.
There's an obligation to honor guarantees and remaining time on billed subscriptions, to be clear about supported OS versions (e.g. unfair to break on 10.11 if you list 10.7+), to assist customers with exporting their data when you retire, etc.
Do not make yourself a slave. If the project is a money-sink, be honest about raising rates, cutting features, or shutting down. If the passion is gone, be honest about passing the torch or going dark. There will always be haters, but trust that most people will understand (though silently), and that you also have a very important obligation to support and maintain yourself.
Also, do you "vet" the submissions? Ex: Here's a SnapChat clone for sale for just $15. There's even a comment from a user asking if price is real. https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/2571/flash-ch...
And here's another one. I saw a Craiglist meets Instagram iOS App that is on App Store, and seems like a real lot of work, that is for sale for just $50. https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/3424/instagra...
And your search is not working. I searched for "Poshmark" to locate the above link to the 'instagram-mets-craiglist-style-app' App project and I get 0 results (the word Poshmark is in that listing)
Here's the URL https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home#search/all/all/a...
I made it, therefore listen to me.
I came up with this idea that you should continue maintaining a side project once someone paid you for the benefit of using it.
Remember, I made it in life, and therefore my idea is right.
A credit-hour is roughly the amount of time you spend in class per week. At my university, most classes were 3 credit-hours. This was usually 1 hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, or 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you have 20 credit-hours in one semester, you are spending 4 hours per weekday in classes, not 8.
Depending on your aptitude for the subject, you may spend an equal amount of time studying or working on assignments outside of classes as you spend in them. But if you pay attention in lecture, and are evaluated mostly by exams, you might not need to spend any additional time.
And I will not be taking any time management advice from anyone who admits to getting only 4 hours per night of sleep, thank you very much. This dude should have dropped his second part-time job, and cut the time spent dating in half, or less. And now that we're at it, he should have studied petroleum engineering instead of linguistics. And instead of attending KU, he should have gone to MIT. And his side projects should have been Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Dropbox.~
Other people are not you. The things you did to succeed won't necessarily work for anyone else. They might not even work for you more than once.
- 3h lecture / week,
- more often than not weekly/semi-weekly homework assignment (at least 4h to complete),
- optional weekly lab work (1-2h),
- optional 1 or 2 midterms,
- optional projects/presentations/demos/competitions,
All of the above included in the 3 credits.
Unlike what you say, a 20 credit course load is not 4h work per day. It is much more work.
Quoted from article:
> Throughout my four years at the university, I took
> 17-21 credit hours per semester. In plain English,
> that means I was in classes for 8 hours per day
> followed by several hours of studying each night.
In plain English, author overstated time spent in classes by a factor of 2.
The usual rubric I've seen is that each credit class in the normal system is 3 hours total time per week, the most common arrangements for that 3 hours/credit are 1 hour lecture + 2 hours assumed out-of-class time for 1 credit, or 3 hours lab for one credit (this may be combined in a lecture + lab course, which might have 10 credits for 5 hours of weekly lecture, 10 hours of presumed out-of-class time accompanying the lecture, and 15 hours of weekly labs.)
A quick check of some online college course catalogs confirms that this appears to be approximately the usual rubric (at least to the extent of 1 hour lecture/week = 1 credit, 3 hours lab/week = 1 credit; the assumed out-of-class time for lecture is not explicit in any catalogs I can find.)
So, depending on the mix of lecture and lab (and assuming no less-common patterns are involved), and assuming (as you do with the division by 5) that all the in-class time involved is on weekdays, 17-21 credit hours corresponds to somewhere between 3.4 and 12.6 hours a weekdays of in-class time.
So, 8 hours per day of in-class is not inconsistent with a 17-21 credit load, but it would be a higher lab-to-lecture ratio in terms of credits.
I don't think your unequivocal statement that the in-class time is inflated by a factor of 2 is justified.
My minor in cognitive science was administered by a three-way alliance between the computer science, linguistics, and psychology departments, and nary a one of them required more time in the classroom per week than the number of credit hours. None. The psych professors, of course, dragooned their students into the psych testing pool for a maximum of two hours per semester, but that was not graded, nor in a classroom.
My chemistry lab sections were all 1 credit-hour, and we spent more time than that every week in the chem lab, which I am willing to count as a "classroom" for the purposes of extending the benefit of the doubt.
Classroom time = lecture + 3 x lab . So in order to be in class 8 hours per day, or 40 hours per week, we get this system of equations:
40 = lec + 3 x lab
21 = lec + lab
lec = 21 - lab
40 = 21 + 2 x lab
19 = 2 x lab
9.5 = lab, 11.5 = lec
You didn't do very much homework for the lecture section. You mostly did the lab work from the lab section. Rather than doing your homework in the dorm, you did it at the bench or the fume hood. So even if you counted time in the lab as "in the classroom", that's still 4 credit-hours for the class, 3 in the lecture, 3 in the lab, and maybe up to six in your room if you really had trouble understanding the material.
So I still have to wonder how someone studying linguistics in general and Maya in particular managed to rack up so many hours "in the classroom" per week.
Degree requirements: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/degree-requirements4...
Course catalog: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/6254
I was unable to identify any possible lab sections other than possibly LING120: The Physics of Speech, for 4 credit-hours, and maybe LING 980: Linguistics Field Work, which seems unlikely for an undergrad. Everything else looked like lectures.
Are you just winding me up here? Nobody takes half their course load as labs. Even if you did all hard science classes, you're still only going to end up with no more than 25% your course load credit-hours as lab sections [as an undergrad], which gets you maybe 6 hours "in the classroom" per day. That's still not 8. I don't think you can convince me that number is not bullshit without the author's actual class schedule.
They also wouldn't let you take more than 20 credits in a semester without written permission as it is too likely you will fold under the pressure. I did 18 credits once and it was a pretty horrible experience.
I break this down more specifically in another post [0], but this is generally true of credits assigned for lecture classes, but not of credits assigned for lab classes, which have a much higher ratio of time-in-class to credit hours. Different ratios of lab to lecture credits will, therefore, result in very different ratios of in-class time to credit hours.
So tell them upfront you might not maintain it indefinitely.
Moral obligation: satisfied! ️
The only person who can sustain a side project long into the future is the creator. Not the people who support it via donations, or buy an item...You and only you are responsible for its shelf-life.
I use a 'zap stylesheets' bookmarklet to make sites like that readable again:
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