Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

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One of the subtitles for this is "a KickStarter for open source projects". I looked at their landing page and utterly failed to understand if this description is accurate for the funding part of this product.

However, if it is, I think it's a terrible model for OSS development, or for funding development in general. I develop Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com), an IDE for Clojure code. When I was starting out and deciding how to fund it, lots of people told me I should do a Kickstarter like Light Table, another popular Clojure IDE. I decided not to and instead did the old-school thing of actually charging for the value I create. 4 years later, Cursive is going great and Light Table has been dead for years, despite obtaining $315k (IIRC) in Kickstarter funding.

So what went wrong with Light Table? The problem is that that funding is not ongoing, it's a one-off thing. $315k sounds like a lot of money, but if you have a couple of people living in San Francisco, you burn through it very quickly. When that money runs out, what do you do? It's really hard to go back and ask for more, and even if you do you're only kicking the can down the road - a year later or whatever you have the same problem again.

Obviously Cursive is not directly comparable to OSS development since it's closed-source and commercial. But the principle remains the same - development needs ongoing funding, not lump sums. As distasteful as it is to many developers, the model that best matches the actual requirements of funding software development is subscription pricing. When I was discussing possible licensing models on my mailing list, one of my users made this point more eloquently than I could:

Software is never delivered as a complete static product, it evolves over time to meet the needs of its users. Perpetual licensing leaves developers in the awkward position of deciding to support that product forever for free, or releasing new paid-for versions regularly and stepping onto the feature treadmill where you have to keep delivering 'value' to attract users away from your old versions. Perpetual licensing is bad for developers and bad for users.

As I said above, I couldn't work out whether OpenTeams is actually more similar to Kickstarter or something like Patreon. I really hope they're aiming for ongoing funding and not one-off lump sums.

Thank you for your detailed comment. We really do appreciate your feedback - it will help us to get better!

Our KickStarter style funding events are called Initiatives. Please visit our early Initiatives page and you will find two projects we are already helping to get funding. We say it is a KickStarter for open source projects because it is a marketplace where companies that use open source software can connect with companies/individuals that will commit on a commercial basis to advance project roadmaps and maintenance. This is similar to KickStarter in the sense that the public (one side of the market place) is funding the project (other side of the marketplace) in return for a promise to use a product/service in the future when it is available.

Unlike Closjure, the projects that start an Initiative will be open source. Additionally, the feature/maintenance that the project releases as a result of the Initiative will also be open source.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many other large companies donate to open source software for a number of reasons. Typically, it is to fund a new feature or to help maintain the project. We are creating a platform for these companies to better fund the projects they rely on (and already fund).

These projects aren't restricted to one Initiative. They can start as many Initiatives as they desire. Of course, the success of the Initiative is dependent on the supply of funding.

With regards to ongoing funding, projects can create an Initiative for maintaining the project which, while it is a lump sum, can be distributed to the maintainers over time (under contract). In this sense, it is similar to the world of startup funding: when you've run out of money, you ask for more and continue to grow.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

One suggestion I have is to use plainer language when describing what this actually is, especially on your landing page. Here in the comments, when describing the project you've repeatedly described it as a marketplace, which makes sense to me. However that word or description doesn't appear at all on your landing page, and after reading the whole page I'm really none the wiser about how it works.

The way you describe all this, it sounds very complicated, but I'm wondering if it really is that complicated in practice. I'd suggest trying to have a "How does the funding work?" section on your landing page, and try to get that section under (say) 100 words. If you can't describe it that briefly, I'd gently suggest that you should try to make the way it works simpler.

In this sense, it is similar to the world of startup funding: when you've run out of money, you ask for more and continue to grow.

I think that's fair enough, especially once it's understood that it's mostly companies who are putting up the money, not individuals. Personally, I'd stay clear of the Kickstarter analogy because Kickstarter doesn't have this ability to go back for more money, and that's a killer for software funding.

I really appreciate the suggestions. They are very insightful and I'll make sure I discuss them all with the team - thank you so much.

In practice, a project needs funding. They create an Initiative on our platform with a product roadmap and outline of what they are going to do (maintenance or a new feature). Companies/individuals that use the project go to the website and provide funding. A contract is formed by the OpenPartner (similar to a general contractor) whereby the project only gets the money once certain requirements are fulfilled. The OpenPartner hires contributors to work on the project and those contributors get to work and are paid as they provide deliverables. Everyone then gets to use the updated software.

We will be working on our messaging so thank you for the feedback.

> but if you have a couple of people living in San Francisco, you burn through it very quickly.

Guess what, most open source code is not developed in Frisco. At least not for pay. You can do a lot with apparently trivial amounts of money, that simply give key volunteer developers the margin of support they need.

_most_ developers live where their companies are and _most_ software companies are in big cities and _most_ big cities in 1st world countries are somewhere on the continuum of expensive to freaking expensive unless you want to live in the slums, and most developers get paid well enough to not live in the slums.

put that all together and you have a high cost of living for _most_ developers. "trivial amounts of money" don't go very far in the city.

Yes, you can move to the country but speaking as someone who works remotely, it is NOT easy to get a good remote job with a company that gets remote and there is a ton of competition for each position. So, it's not easy for most of us to just move somewhere cheap and "do a lot with apparently trivial amounts of money" Sure, it's possible. It's just not probable, or likely.

> I decided not to and instead did the old-school thing of actually charging for the value I create

Did you convert the license from open source to proprietary, or was it never open source in the first place?

Cursive was originally based on an old plugin for editing Clojure code developed by some JetBrains people in their spare time. It was effectively abandoned. I spent some time working on it and was going to take over maintenance of it when I considered making it into a product. By the time I released Cursive much of the original code was gone, but there's still some there lurking in the darker corners. That plugin was Apache licensed and I checked with JetBrains and the original devs if they would mind me making a product out of it. My code in the project has never been open source.

Hm, maybe I'm missing something, but for me it seems unfair to compare initially open source LightTable and closed Cursive, doesn't it? Even more, according to the website Cursive is built on top of IntelliJ---well known and polished/tested by dozens of developers commercial IDE.

So I cannot get a point in this comparison: different business models, different licenses, etc.

I mentioned that the projects are not directly comparable. My main point was that ongoing software development requires ongoing funding, and Kickstarter doesn't provide that. If this project does, then I think that Kickstarter is a poor analogy for them to use in their marketing material.

But why one earth would someone living of KS money live in SF - one of the most expensive places to live, even on crazy SF money

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