Helm: Open Source Real Time Discussions
indiegogo.com
indiegogo.com
It's impossible to say how this trend will work long term but I suspect a lot of the open source software I love today wouldn't exist if it had relied upon raising $50k up front.. not only because of the likelihood of raising the cash but because the lesser extrinsic motivation suggests, perhaps, that there was more intrinsic motivation for developing and releasing those projects?
I think it's great if proven projects take donations or sponsorship to kick things up another notch or to support full time developers, but merely to start a project? I'm on the fence about that, and will be interested to see how it plays out as a model.
What I find confusing is why a big upfront investment is necessary merely to start the project and, perhaps more importantly, why it wouldn't be a true open source project and only open sourced at the end. Why not open source what they have already and see if it sells itself by attracting collaborators?
It's not clear from the page or the video if they've open sourced the work done on the prototype already, but if they have and people are already playing with it and seeing promise, it becomes a much easier sell. Many good open source projects got significant sponsorship or raised money for people to work on them after initially proving itself, and that's great.
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_surg...
A response from the people running the project leads me to believe this is true. Essentially it seems they're seeking funding for their product but the open sourcing of the project is a big cherry on top (rather than it being purely an "open source project").
Because of the time commitment involved, we're trying to fund it so we can work on it (as well as the software we'll be building on top of) full-time from the start.
I think the part of this that got me pondering is that typically a basic prototype or initial version would be open sourced, people would play with it, and then funding or sponsorship would come along. Projects like Redis, WordPress, TravisCI, jQuery, Node.js, Ruby, Phusion Passenger, and PHP come to mind.
Your approach is different in asking for money up front and then promising to open source only when the project is finished.
While it seems you are awesome guys, much loved, and do good work, it's that leap from the previously established model that gets me wondering if it's a good approach. Maybe it is and I just don't realize it yet. Maybe I'm being nostalgic. But if this project were already open sourced and you were asking for funding to make a serious go of it, it would, to me, seem an easier sell than "we want to build X, give us the $ we need, and we'll open source it when we're done."
I suspect I'm just being a bit of an old fogey, but without questions come no answers.. ;-)
We could certainly open up the code sooner, it just won't be polished enough to use from the get-go.
Most of all, it's an experiment for us. Do other people want this service as much as we do? Is this a valid way to try to bootstrap something? Can a service 100% (K, so 95%) open-source itself & still make ends meet?
That's a better way for me to interpret it actually. I latched on to the "open source" aspect as being of utmost significance, but really it seems you are taking the well trod route of getting funding for your product - much like anyone who applies to YC or seeks investors - and the open source part is a nice big cherry on the top when you're done. Given that, your approach makes a lot more sense vs my initial "we wanna do an open source project, give us $ to start!" interpretation ;-)
Well, good luck! You have certainly picked an area of software that is crying out for better solutions.
We successfully raised about $25k [2] about 14 months ago. It took that long before we could get any additional money since the service we were offering (similar to what Automattic does with Wordpress, wasn't generating revenue yet).
I spoke with a handful of angels and seed stage investors. Never got much traction with them. Applied at the standard incubators and got a few interviews but no offers.
Oddly, what did stick was a fellowship we received from The Shuttleworth Foundation [3]. It's been an interesting journey at what started with traditional angel and VC funding to something more in line with our vision, a fellowship from a foundation that focuses on "open".
I've got ton of blog posts about the experience so far...
[1] http://theopenphotoproject.org
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-phot...
[3] http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/
I used tornado load balanced by haproxy for the Web servers instead of Django. Backend is mongodb and I use a small tornado driven zeromq to manage passing updates between the front ends real time. That router also does all the db writes.
I built it in my spare time (and it shows) just to have a place to take twitter conversation to get around the 140 character limit
Not sure why you would need to seek funding to open source something like this. Today's frameworks make it pretty easy. Is there really enough need for another chat server? One motivation for me was to play with zeromq and tornado together. There are already other more robust and stable chat solutions out there. I never even considered there would be enough interest in it to open source my app.
The problem is that, while building the core of this is easy-ish, the end result should be something very complete & easy to stand up. Our prototype functions (barely, mostly just due to a lack of time), but it's not polished or complete. It's not smooth, easy to use/administer & it doesn't include all the little details that go into successful software projects.
Not sure if you're coming back to read this, but I'm curious about why django? Did you choose it because of your comfort level with it or are there advantages django offers for this kind of app? I built a few things with django a while back before I moved on to tornado for everything. Not because django was bad, tornado was just a better fit for what I've been building.
Carry on