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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

> My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value.

Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?

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+100

this is a YC-fundable startup. Here are the projects I can think of:

1. Celery - jeez. It runs half the world's high availability python software, yet has severe funding crunch.

2. Octave - obviously

3. Jupyter+Pandas - http://jupyter.org/

4. Vue.js - http://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/

5. PyPy

>The OpenSSL project management team consists of four people, and the entire development group consists of 11 members, out of which 10 are volunteers; there is only one full-time employee, Stephen Henson, the lead developer

I mean, it's only OpenSSL which was for a long time the foundation of much of the online economy.

Or the various BSD's.

6. Django

Here's how to do it: combine dev-bootcamps with FSF.

People already pay big bucks to learn how to code, use that to fund the senior devs, the junior devs gain the experience they need to change their career trajectory.

This guy should not have been the director and doing the majority of the legwork for 25 years! He needs to be put in a position to get an awesome job at either classic big tech corporate, then some high prestige research unit. And there should be an understudy in the queue set to take over the work, and eventually earn his reward in the afterlife.

Humble Bundle does this for indie games and other digital goods. I'm guessing they've thought about doing something similar for software like you mention but decided not to for some reason. It would be interesting to know why.

Perhaps the model needs support / services included.

Edit: or perhaps humble bundle is just more oriented to consumer goods.

If it's fundable, then what would it actually do?

Presumably we're past the point where anything with a .com in the name gets showered in VC money.

THIS!!!

In open-source there is a huge difference between value generated and value collected. The people behind open-source projects are often clueless (sorry, but it's true) how to extract value from their work while keeping community happy. How about a service which helps authors monetize open-source software for some percentage?

I honestly don't think this will be very easy to achieve on a human level. There are plenty of platforms that allow devs to meet sales partners but most people would rather just go at it alone or don't trust others or don't play well with others etc etc. Even the author of this piece, who testifies to poverty, chooses to ask for global donations rather than seek out a business partner

A sales partner is different to a company that helps monetise.

And just because he is asking for donations doesn't mean he's against monetising.

Depends how you pay the company as I wrote above. If you're just a poor single man op you share revenue and that company becomes your partner

I think it would be something like "sign up with us and we handle the sales, support, billing, and invoicing".

Lots of open source projects don't need to bring on a business partner, but they might benefit from something like this. Just like not everyone on Kickstarter would go out and raise money by themselves.

The dev would presumably pay through revenue share, because we already established s/he is poor, making a jv where the marketing provider will ask for many adjustments from the dev because they need results fast. It's not a clear cut provider/client relationship and I'm not sure how many devs would choose to pursue this

A webpage page with a list of projects that take funding, their licenses and how successful the funding is would be a great start.

Is there a repeatable way to do that?

Most people (think: GNU wizards) who do projects like this don't want to monetize; not for capability reasons, but for philosophical and social reasons. They think monetization is against some principal of free software, or their morals, or that people will stop using their software if they do, or, simply: they're lazy and just want to code, without worrying about menial things like income.

And then, when they can't afford to work on their project anymore, they want our pity. They don't have mine.

There already is one, it's called Supported Source: https://supportedsource.org/

More projects just need to use it.

I don't know if this should be done by a for profit startup or should be done by foundations like the FSF.

This shouldn't be for-profit. It should be a non-profit granting foundation where projects could apply for grants based on merit and need. Let the foundation handle the paperwork and accept donations on behalf of everyone. Have a board of directors made up of well respected open-source names, and you'd be well on your way.

Grant applications, at least in academia, I've heard take lots of time / etc away from actual work - Although if this became the norm maybe it would lower the hurdle - Alternatively, an nomination system could be used, or something based on stars / forks / etc of a repository?

They do take time, but they are also helpful for planning purposes (I will do X and Y if given Z amount of money). There would need to be some sort of application, but it doesn't need to be as elaborate as (say) an NSF proposal. I would imagine community engagement or recommendations would also be a valid criterion to elevate a proposal's score.

Ok, I am calling for a ban on the "maybe there could be a startup that solves the problem?" style comments without at least trying to flesh out how they would actually do that.

Well that's told me! I'll have a think about this and see what I can come up with.

I mean, that's a great idea, but the question is whether you can monetize what's ultimately a communal, even communistic, mode of operation.

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