Great funding model: Adopt a line of code | Hacker News Reader

Great funding model: Adopt a line of code

getmiro.com

41 pointsgeeko27 comments

I think this is a great example on innovation.

"When you adopt, you'll get: an official adoption page, a cute image of your line of code (watch it grow over the year), badges for your blog or website, and your name will be listed in the 'about' box in every copy of Miro (more than 5 million a year and growing)."

I also want a t-shirt with my line of code please :)

thanks geeko! we've worked hard on this over the past few weeks.

it's been nearly impossible to get financial support from our community by simply asking for donations. hopefuly this will make it more fun for people and turn things around.

They add a special message below the fold for people in Europe:

"Hello there! It looks like you are visiting from Europe.

Did you know that there are more Miro users in Europe than in the United States, but more than 99% of our financial support comes from American donations and philanthropies? Europe loves open-source, right? Help us make something great!"

What if your line of code gets deleted during refactoring?

Would you adopt any other line of opensource code? Can it be generalized?

It appears they're selling a specific line number, so as long as the total number of lines doesn't decrease below the number they've sold, it shouldn't be a problem.

The Tamagotchi funding model... neat. I like the idea, very clever. Though I wonder what happens to your line of code if it gets deprecated...

before:

self.callSomething()

after:

# self.callSomething() /* Don't remove (donated) */

:-)

the line of code is always there in version control. i wouldn't want to clutter up a file with unnecessary comments, so maybe those """ Don't remove (donated) """ lines could be placed in separate files.

Christ, $4 a month is a bit steep isn't it?!

Do you realize how much one line of code, in the Linux kernel for example, would cost a large organization to write and maintain?

Actually, I don't. Any estimates?

You could estimate this by comparing it to the dev teams behind all Windows OSes. I don't know the share of MSFT's many tens of thousands of employees that contribute to the OS. Let's say it's just 2000 FTE. I'm told a good startup estimate for FTEs is $15K/mo. 2K * 15K * 12 = $360M. Windows XP had 40M sloc, making for $9 / line.

That makes this at least within the right order of magnitude. Then again, this is an application, not an OS. Also, the linux kernel isn't everything, and XP isn't the only OS to consider, i.e. maybe Windows Mobile should be included too.

It's not a 'great funding model' - frankly, few nonprofits spring to mind that have found one; my main criticism of this lies in long term interest - the success of this is buzz-based, and like million dollar homepage, that's going to pass, maybe sooner than they expect; but it is a nice implementation of an innovative way to get donations and build attachment to something so obscure and (to the end user) abstract as the code running software. Miro will garner a lot of goodwill with this offbeat stunt, that's bound to be a good thing.

now, who's going to start selling 'adoption' of modules/objects/libs that get incorporated into lots of other projects? "Hi Daddy, here's where I've made myself useful this month (links to projects where the snippet is found on google code/sourceforge/github/etc). By the way, my biological father/mother has another kid up for adoption!"

That is an incomprehensibly gorgeous page.

i = i + 1 # this line sponsored by Ethel Moskowitz in honor of her grandmother

silly question: if this is successful, won't it lead to an incentive for the developers to add unnecessary extra lines of code, sort of an anti-refactoring - "how can I express this in more lines..." - in order to increase the number of adoptable lines?

Do you really foresee them running out of lines? "Adopting out"?

i'd rather see people adopting very small modules. possibly people could bid on them based on the module elegance and usefulness and extensibility, etc. lines of code can get removed, whereas concepts tend to stick around, plus motivating well designed modules is better than motivating greater number of loc.

every month that goes by without a bug, the module slightly increases in value, or the donator gets paid a dividend.

Yes, I'd much rather adopt a function... although I'd rather not pay more than $5 a month.

Perhaps a function could be adopted by more than one person? First two people get to be parents, then after that your title would be grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, and what have you.

I absolutely love your idea. I think the best thing about it is that it can be dead-simple or ridiculously complex, with dividends and whatnot, but the idea works for so many projects.

An added thought could be sponsoring modules that don't exist yet to spur on their development, maybe your company uses some open source product that supports a bunch of file formats but not .xyz, you could donate to a speculative XYZ Module and then everyone benefits and the developers have an incentive to write it.

does it cost less to buy a closing brace?

Miro is written in Python.

There are still closing braces in Python, because there are still braces in Python. They just do not tend to have there own line.

If every line gets a sponsor and you still don't have enough money, will you rewrite it in Java?

Not fair, the ruby people are going to get the least funding!

If we're going to feel sorry for someone, let's feel sorry for the K, J, and APL people.

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