Comment by steventruong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steventruong | Hacker News Reader

I know quite a few people with a stay at home wife, child, high cost of living, etc.. that have figure out ways to make money to supplement their cost of living so they can have some free time. There are ways to get side income that would be enough to free up some time to do these open source projects if you're willing to do what it takes and think about it. Just wanted to put my two cents in on this portion of your comment and let you know that it is possible if that is something you want to explore.

That said, I agree with Overshard that Kickstarter has have open source projects and is fine for that sort of thing. Don't use one example you find off Gun.io as a reason for it not working. By that argument, people shouldn't do startups because it sure is easy to find examples of failed ones... Diaspora was open source I believe and that did just fine on Kickstarter. Just saying.

Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree with the your point that if spending more time coding was my number one priority outside of the other things mentioned I could make time for that. Without laying out every single detail of my life, it's not possible to paint the picture but it always comes down to priorities. Currently because of my priorities I will not spend the time building this software that I think would be super beneficial to a lot of people but if I was able to raise a reasonable amount of money, than I would be able to re-prioritize accordingly. It's not that I couldn't make time it's just that at this time in my life I won't for these projects because they don't rank in my top 3-4 most important things that I'm trying to focus on.

Kickstarter has worked for some open source projects and seems to do a decent job. I however can imagine a site that was more tailored to open source software would be able to offer a lot of useful features that Kickstarter won't provide.

Thanks for the feedback. Fun to think through these things.

I'm sure I understand why funding would make you re-prioritize if you don't want to already in pursuit of what you want to do. There is an old adage about how having more money doesn't solve a person's problems. In this case, the same principle to a varying degree can be applied.

But to be fair, I don't know anything about you, your situation, your priorities, etc... So take the above as general advice and not specific advice. I just personally think that its the wrong way to look at something and that if you want to pursue something, you have to make an effort to do so rather than believe money will help shift your priorities. It shouldn't hold you back.

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