With Assembly (YC W12), anyone can contribute to open-source and get paid
theverge.com
theverge.com
Happy to answer questions.
It seems like many users are creating bounties for projects that they work on and then fulfilling those same bounties.
Most projects also have a single user with over 90% of the ownership of a project. While that mirrors how many OSS projects are structured, it doesn't really favor the "collaborative" message of Assembly. Are you doing anything to adjust that, or is it something that is fine in your minds?
If an OSS project gains traction, it generally becomes a PaaS solution with 3-5 major providers and many smaller providers. How in the world can Assembly hope to promise people revenue with that model?
Open bounties represent new ownership potential. Transparency is important here - it is one reason why ownership is on the blockchain, this allows it to be verifiable outside of Assembly.
> It seems like many users are creating bounties for projects that they work on and then fulfilling those same bounties.
All new ownership in a product is earned through the same mechanism. This makes progress transparent and participation fair.
> Most projects also have a single user with over 90% of the ownership of a project. While that mirrors how many OSS projects are structured, it doesn't really favor the "collaborative" message of Assembly. Are you doing anything to adjust that, or is it something that is fine in your minds?
Active products rarely have owners with anything close to 90%. Some products may be skewed to an individual that's done a lion share of work initially, but there are many others that are more spread out or become so with time. Opposed to completely working alone, having others to bounce ideas or make other contributions that complement your skills is what Assembly community members find collaborative.
> If an OSS project gains traction, it generally becomes a PaaS solution with 3-5 major providers and many smaller providers. How in the world can Assembly hope to promise people revenue with that model?
It's challenging to compare Assembly products to traditional open source projects & libraries. The Assembly community is building real products, they just happen to have source code that is open source and participation is open, transparent, and collaborative. To clarify, Assembly does not promise a product will earn revenue...only that if any profit is generated, it will be distributed to the contributors. Assembly is already distributing proceeds from revenue producing products, some members are earning over $1000 a month for previous contributions. This aligns Assembly's success with our community.
You didn't answer my question. The real answer is that the project contract can create a situation where a project initiator could completely abandon a project and still continue to earn shares in the project due to the "obligatory service charge" nature of the bounty system for early adopters.
> This makes progress transparent and participation fair.
mdeiters receives 20% of all new bounties completed on the coderwall project. In what way is that fair?
> Active products rarely have owners with anything close to 90%
Two of the top 8 projects on the projects page have over 90%, and three have over 70%.
Let's just say we learned a lot afterwards, so good luck to you. Great if you can pull it off. Just don't fake it for too long :-)
Our story: http://www.cnet.com/news/fairsoftware-virtualizes-startups/
Looking at https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web and other repos, look like all the open source activity must be inside assembly. That presume everyone want to be part of it, and that everyone look for financial gains.
Is possible to accept contributions in the normal sense, and only have inside assembly the "core team" or only the members that are part of the financial-side of the project?
My only critique is if this things scales to become big, it means people will increasingly try to game the system (i.e. figure out how maximize returns by illegitimate means). Money motivations do funny things to people.
But it's atrocious to use. 50% of the page is wasted in whitespace, another 30-40% in boilerplate and the use of the site is not intuitive. My cursor will change to a pointer when things aren't actually clickable and trying to use the slider causes text on the page to be selected.
Onto the actual application, it's impossible to determine how value is assigned, what a vote is, why I can vote if I'm logged out, what that means, etc.
This is a tool designed to be primarily used by smart, relatively technical people with copy and design directed towards your average Facebook user.
Edit: As a final note, your FAQ is 10 pages and almost 100 questions long. This creates a huge barrier to entry for new users. Many of those questions only exist due to inefficiencies in your UI. It's very daunting, and honestly I would never use this product for its intended purpose at this point.
Would Assembly be able to provide this type of service, or is there another one out there that does this already, that I'm not aware of?
#1. Lack of good ideas. Most of the ideas are rather unmotivational to me. I realize that this could be an entirely personal hangup, so I don't hold this against the platform.
#2. Lack of good leadership. After participating in discussions with a few of the project leads, and reading the content posted by others, it looks like few (if any) of the people starting projects there have any idea how building a product works. See "Voices" for an example. It's tough to get behind some of these people.
That said, Assembly could be a really powerful platform. Just waiting for the right idea to come along I guess...
(Thanks for the 689 coins just now!)
A few things:
The product doesn't have an "owner", and nobody has an earning package.
So a user could create large bounties and award them to him/her self (thus increasing his/her share of the profits), but that would make the community less motivated to work with that person, and anyone in the community can weigh in on what a bounty should be worth, so the community is able to protect itself from bad behavior.
Also, most products end up with multiple core team members, so typically the additional authority of the Core Team doesn't lie on one person.
Notable, from the next question:
> Additionally, most products have “tip contract.” The default tip contract is that 5% of all new coins are tipped to the Core Team, and 5% are tipped to the bounty author.