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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

I now have a business idea: Curated Open-Source App Forks.

Would you pay to have access to a service which tweaked the open-source software you use just enough to make it much more useful to your workflow, and automatically updated it over time? (I'm not just talking about a one-time fork; I'm talking about a subscription to get access to a maintained fork that stays current with upstream, fixes any conflicts, does the rebuild, hosts the build, etc... This justifies a cost) This incompatibility with DJI images that the Darktable devs #wontfix is a perfect example use-case.

Needless to say this would be for professional use, with professional expectations, but if your business depends on having that slightly-tweaked tool, then it may be worth it; just exploring the idea, here

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Honest answer from me: Probably not, because vanilla Claude Code already does a great job of maintaining my forks with open-source main, and also handles the packaging and installation beautifully.

There is a huge overlap between (OSS users, people who can code) and an even bigger overlap between (OSS users, people who can use coding AI tools)

The people who can't even use coding AI tools almost universally use closed-source software like Adobe Lightroom that you can't fork easily.

There's quite a difference in my experience between "using coding AI tools" and "using coding AI tools _well_", especially when it comes to editing code.

Doesn't really matter in this case. Doesn't matter enough for people to pull out their wallet. You can re-fork from clean OSS and re-implement any time while you sleep, using whatever AI subscription you already have.

I think you overestimate the number of photographers who are also comfortable with CLI tools, because doing this via web-facing UI's is quite less capable currently

Those photographers you speak of (95%) are using Lightroom and Photoshop and you wouldn't be able to build a fork business for them. The 5% who use Darktable are likely comfortable with CLI tools.

Isn't this what happened with ElasticSearch and AWS OpenSearch? I imagine that OSS developers will not appreciate this at scale, especially if the core developers are not reaping some of the revenue from such a project.

VPD - virtual private developer. Sell off parcels of developer attention by the hour!

Somebody™ should do it with Ansel IMHO.

Nope

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