Ask HN: Is there a platform for free development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a platform for free development?

3 pointsTowaway6914 comments

I had a thought for creating a platform where developers offer to develop solutions to problems for companies for free but the developers get to choose the technology they wish to use.

The goal would be to get hobbist to try out their technological ideas on real world problems without financial risks to the problem givers.

Is there such a platform? Kickstarter is not what I have in mind, that's hoping to get money to do something. This is doing something to prove it works.

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Very few solutions don’t need to integrate with other systems. As such, I think you need to change the premise of “the developers get to choose the technology they wish to use”

Good luck!

and that in business settings, livelihood of many is dependent on timely delivery or at least guaranteed delivery.

You can't say oh I am sorry, could not build your online order system because Rust async ecosystem is so fractured and SQLite is written in C so I can't accept that while the tech stack is all Rust + Typescript with TRPC + Tailwind.

True but the types of problems I imagine are those that companies have but have imperfect workarounds.

Central to the entire premise is that these problems are not core to the business, rather things that are itches but not wounds yet.

There might be https://fr.fiverr.com/ that could answer your question. I don't know if there is a minimum charge. But it's very generalized, the site is for any kind of creation (music, image, code,...)

Cheers, I'll have a look :+1:

I came across this https://codebuy.org/

Isn’t this just what free open-source software does already?

Free open source software does not necessarily solve real world problems, it solves someones problem but not necessarily the problem at hand.

And yet, almost every piece of commercial software is built on the free labor of open source devs

But is it free labour? Many work for companies that pay their salary.

It's the ones who work on technology in their free time but can't reach a bigger market who I would like to reach with this idea.

Those that work not for money but because they are convinced by an idea.

I would say that paid open source work is the exception, not the rule.

There must be surveys on this somewhere. It would be interesting to know how exactly all these open source developers feed themselves.

Reminds of that meme - will code HTML for food.

I hope I’m not making a strawman of your idea. So you want developers to work for free on whatever it is a company wants, with the only caveat that the dev gets to choose the tech stack? What is the value of the platform to the dev at that point? They can do that already without a middleman telling them what to work on.

Furthermore, what company wants free work that might be totally irrelevant if the tech stacks don’t align?

The idea is that the developer gets to try out their tech stack on a real world problem.

How many folks here have an itch and start developing something that scratches that itch and then don't know what the next step is.

Now imagine being able to try out that solution in a bigger space. Will it work, will it fail, who knows. I as a developer want to try it out, the company has the risk that it will work and then they need to deal with the fact that their existing tech stack can't solve all their problems.

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