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Comment by beaumartinez | Hacker News Reader

> I am starting a company, npm, Inc., to deliver new products and services related to npm.

I don't know whether I should be concerned a core part of Node.js is becoming "businessy". Is this common amongst other big software projects?

Providing "premium" services is a slippery slope. What happens when someone wants to add a feature to npm that the premium services already provide, for example?

Python and Django have non-profits which help sustain their ecosystems, but AFAIK Node.js doesn't. Perhaps it would be a good step.

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I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical support or custom open source development, rather than closed-source code.

Canonical and Red Hat are examples of for-profit businesses that primarily build and distribute free software, including employing some of the developers and managing some of the open source projects they distribute. I believe both make money primarily through "premium services" (especially "enterprise" support services).

Ximian was a for-profit company started by Nat Friedman and GNOME project founder Miguel de Icaza, which developed much of the GNOME code base for a while. (It was later acquired by Novell.) Miguel went on to found the Mono project and Xamarin, the for-profit company that leads development of Mono.

Qt, MySQL, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB were each developed in part by businesses using dual licensing models, where licenses for use with non-free-software were available for a fee. (The original companies have since been acquired by Nokia, Sun, Oracle, and Oracle, respectively. Sun was itself later acquired by Oracle.)

The author of SQLite earns income by providing commercial support and custom development services: http://www.sqlite.org/support.html

The developers of CyanogenMod recently founded a VC-backed company to fund its development. I'm sure there are a bunch more examples like this that I've forgotten or don't know about.

I agree that a non-profit foundation has benefits for free software projects. (I've been a developer on three projects associated with non-profits: Audacity, Debian, and Mozilla.) "For profit" as I used it above may be the wrong label, though. "Taxable" might be a better word in some cases. If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit. For example, I'm employed by the Mozilla Corporation, a taxable entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation has to pay taxes because of the nature of its income and spending, but its mission is still that of its sole shareholder, the Foundation.

> If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit

Well, that depends on your shareholders.

Mozilla Corp can do this, because its only shareholder is Mozilla Foundation.

However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit.

In my opinion, "turning a profit" in fact serves the greater needs of the npm/node community, because servers cost money. npm isn't just a program, it's a service, and services require infrastructure. So, it's not a conflict at all.

It is a very foolish business person who sees an exponential curve of user engagement, and decides that the best way to make money is to screw all those people.

> However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit.

This is not true. The shareholder value myth has been debunked by law professors.

"...shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law."

http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482

"Contrary to myth, the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to corporate giant Unilever wasn’t legally required."

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_...

Yeah, whatever. Academic. IANAL, but I'm guessing you aren't either, so let's leave that to the lawyers. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Bottom line, I've done a lot of work on npm over the last 4 years, and I've got some ideas about how to best take care of it in the future. Those ideas require money, and it's a lot easier to get money if you have a plan to turn it into MORE money. (This IS still a site about startups, right? ;)

If things keep expanding and growing like they have, then it's going to require more money. So, we've gotta earn our keep to be sustainable, and the way to do that is to provide stuff people will pay for.

Also, I like to make money. It's fun, and it keeps you grounded in reality, if you run it like a responsible business. So that's another nice plus of going this route. I still have full flexibility to carve things up however I want later on, and like I said, we're keeping every option on the table.

> This IS still a site about startups, right?

Yes, but this thread is still about a language.

> I like to make money.

Of course. And the main concern with npm, Inc is whether making money will at some point conflict with wanting to make npm better, no-strings-attached.

npm's "no strings attached" low-ceremony approach is the reason why it's taken off like it has. The purpose of all this is to keep that going.

If "make money" ever appears to be in conflict with the thing that puts us in a position to make money, then we're thinking about it wrong.

For example, imagine if Twitter were not from the get-go a for-profit company. If they got really popular, and then said, "Hey, guys, we can't keep the lights on without figuring how a monetization strategy, so we're gonna take some VC and do that." It wouldn't be wise to assume that "make money" was going to mean "charge to read or post tweets". Forget love or greed or good and evil, that wouldn't be a smart way to make money.

What is currently free will remain free, precisely because the free-ness of it is what makes npm interesting.

You could also consider creating a B Corp,[0] which balances its duty to shareholders against a duty to also promote the common good. And there are examples VC-backed B Corps, such as Disconnect.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_corporation

[1] https://disconnect.me/#about

We've looked into making benefit corp or dual-purpose corp for npm, and it's still on the table.

The tricky thing is that, while there ARE some VCs that back them, most of them are pretty interested in bigger plays than "sharing javascript programs with other javascript programmers".

Disconnect is a pretty revolutionary idea, that will change society in some dramatic ways if it catches on. Most VCs that invest in benefit corps are looking for bigger plays than what we're doing. This is a pretty straightforward technology service that already has loads of adoption and upward-trending engagement graphs. It was just a lot easier to go the more traditional C Corp route first.

From what I heard on the nodeup podcast, many corporate node users are eschewing all modules they did not develop themselves, hosting their own internal package managers and rewriting libraries in order to avoid unvetted 3rd party code.

It seems like this is the market that NPM premium is after. The question is will businesses be more comfortable using a premium service? In other words - someone they can sue?

EDIT: It think it was the security episode, if I recall correctly.

yes a slippery slop indeed. The bigger problem is the current economic system/context that we are all operating in. I for one would prefer a NPM non-profit (maybe with a for-profit branch for consulting).

How does the Python and Django non-profits work right now?

This is pretty common, and there's certainly a wave of open source software based companies currently. Definitely a tricky thing to navigate, of course.

Typically I find it works best when the company is very clear about which areas they feel should be open source and which areas they will be monetizing. Its the ambiguity and loss of trust that creates tension.

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