Thoughts on an Open Source Company | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on an Open Source Company

damienkatz.net

40 pointsjlhamilton14 comments

The never fire, never layoff policies make it critical to hire the right people. Wonder if that causes stress. It would keep me awake at night.

"Critical...?" Yeah, critical in that if you make one particularly wrong hire (the sort who drags down others, see e.g. the Corncob Antipattern), your company is dead.

One of the things I always checked about a startup I was considering joining was if they were capable of firing people.

The article actually says:

Never fire. We constantly emphasize you can't get fired for lack of productivity or being stupid or foolish. You can get fired for ethical reasons. We should strive for openness and honesty in all matters.

So they will fire people, but only for "ethical" reasons.

Noble thoughts. I'm not a lawyer, so this is mostly a question: if you're dealing in open-source only, and your product is service, wouldn't it make sense to form a partnership firm?

All the things he talks about - a sense of ownership, people managing their own affairs, shared responsibilities - are made explicit when you do it that way, right?

Here's a snapshot of their quarterly earnings report:

"Good morning and thank you for your interest in our company. I'm happy to announce that over the past 3 months we have seen a 5% yoy increase in Git commits and a whopping 25% increase in refactorings..."

I don't know, it all sounds a bit too good to be true. I love working on open source software myself, so I wish them the best of luck, though, because if it works out, it sounds like a dream company.

I really would like to start a company with quite the same rules. Perhaps I should start by getting my ass up and contributing more to open source software.

I've seen a few open source companies that wound up being successful... when just starting out, how do you find paying clients to do services for?

You start the open source project at your day job, then two years later when there is a critical mass of potential customers you start the startup.

By having something we want short term expertise on. I'd contract any of the Damien, J. Chris, or Jan in a heartbeat to help bootstrap Couch for us, if they were up for it :-)

You write software people want to use. Then you wait. And while you're waiting you write about it, talk about it, and make the software better. Eventually clients come to you.

They're eventually going to need (and want) someone to run the sales pipeline.

Well maybe not. Professional services companies in other sectors don't always have sales people - think law and accounting firms, and other types of consultancies (if the comparison seems odd, see my earlier question about partnership firms). I guess it depends whom you cater to.

Good point. But often I imagine that even these old-world service firms tend to see specialization of labor from the partners, and somebody ends up holding the sales bag. I just think most software companies as idealistic and technical as this one will probably wish to have someone else attend to all the messy pre-sale human interaction once they reach a certain scale. If only to provide a clean signal of the right opportunities, shorn of noise.

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