pytrin

I'm one of the batch founders (Binpress). I know most of the companies on the list intimately, and most of the data is completely inaccurate (some is even ridiculous - 2 companies have 0 employees according to this chart).

I hope no one, and especially investors - take this site seriously. We're doing well, but some of the other companies are counting on the upcoming demo day for a last push to their fund raising efforts. Mattermark would serve themselves and their users better by doing some actual diligence on the companies before publishing this data, instead of just aggregating old crunch-base data and Alexa rankings.

I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the "thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title "Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].

I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should only be about the love - if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens, not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their real job during the day.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open-source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.

We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon-valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).

If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at eran@binpress.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).

[1] http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-l...

[2] http://www.binpress.com

Binpress, Mountain View, CA, Full-Time

We are the marketplace for commercial open-source, connecting open-source developers with businesses and enterprises through commercial licensing, support, customization and integration services.

http://www.binpress.com

We are in the 500startups accelerator program batch #6 (ending August 1st), and have already raised half of our seed round. We're generating significant revenue and are trying to change the way software is being developed.

We are looking to fill out a few positions:

* Growth hacker - paid / organic acquisition person (PPC, SEO, SEM, Content marketing) with creative, out-of-the-box thinking for acquiring new customers and publishers.

* Developer evangelist / community manager - an outgoing developer who loves to attend meetups, hackathons and engage people on social media and offline. You will be doing all of that as well as active outreach to find our next top developers on the marketplace.

We're a small and extremely agile team. You'll be one of our first hires, and you can expect significant equity in addition to a competitive salary if you produce results.

We'll be in the 500startups offices in Mountain View until the end of August, and then move to an office in the bay area. If you join before the end of the program, you'll have access to all the program events and network.

Please apply via AngelList at https://angel.co/jobs?startup_id=2506

> And to be clear, just writing that your project is MIT licensed or sticking it in a package.json or making a small remark in your README doesn't cut it.

My point is that it does cut it. It's up to the licensee to include the license, not the copyright holder. There is nothing improper about specifying the license and not including it in its entirety. That's just your personal interpretation of it, that has nothing to do with copyright law.

You're completely off on this subject. The copyright holder can do whatever he wants with it - including releasing it under multiple, different licenses. The onus is on the licensee - a person who obtains the licensed code, to honor the license given to him. It's the responsibility of the licensee to comply with the terms of the license and republish whatever needs republishing when (if) he redistributes the code.

We use dashboard.io internally at 500startups - https://dashboard.io/ (Paul Singh's latest startup), and it's quite effective. It has multiple inner networks on the same network (like founders, mentors and staff inside the bigger 500startups network), discussions, events and private messaging. Highly recommended

You can use the 1st column for numbering the steps

Our "developer" license is very similar to a free open-source license in the liberties it provides, except for a non-compete clause which says you can't redistribute "as-is" (you can, however, as part of a larger / modified work). This is a big concern for a lot of people working on commercial products - if adding this clause gets them over the hump to release their code - we think there's tremendous value in that.

On the other hand, almost all of our licenses include an SLA - which no free open-source license does. In fact, one of the main reasons often cited by people releasing code with FOSS licenses is that they don't have to support it (doesn't mean they won't, they just don't have to). We think the guarantee of support is worth a lot in certain sectors (such as SMBs and enterprise).

I didn't redefine anything. You are welcome to read about [1] Commercial Open Source. You talk as though the availability of the source-code has no value.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open-source_applicat...

Interesting point. We're considering something along those lines - a crowdfunding option for open-source projects, i.e, kickstarter for open-source. The problem with pre-funding a project, is that it's much harder to create interest (unless you hit a very common, painful need) vs. an existing solution that can be used right now. We'll be looking into it more in the future.

Glad to hear it. If you have specific questions, feel free to reach out to eran[at]our domain.com

Discovery, curation and support is what we offer on the front for people looking for solutions. For developers, we provide a complete platform to turn their open-source project into a business, something that is usually only accessible to the most popular projects due to the overhead involved. We handle marketing, distribution, licensing, payments, payouts and more. If you are someone who can do all of that himself, and has the reach and marketing skills to reach an audience - you don't need a service like us. From our experience (before we even started this service), most developers do not have those abilities.

By open-source we are talking about the availability and sharing of code, for the benefit of everyone involved. The choice of whether to use an existing open-source license, a generated license (with the developer's choices) or a combination (i.e, what most big open-source companies do, such as MySQL, Magento, etc) - is up to the developer. We are trying to promote the sharing of code - even code that would not have been released under free open-source licenses.

Not sure if being snarky or not. If you have concrete feedback / criticism, we'd love to hear it.

Thanks, checking out their free trial now

How is it better than Netbeans or Eclipse? I've been using mostly the former (after Zend Studio went AWOL). How does PHPStorm compare to those alternatives?

You guys should file to have a 'hub' TLD added, then you'd have the ultimate domain - git.hub

You never heard of B2B startups? I'm a founder in one, and I found the article very relevant.

Yeah, I found this notion amusing too. The only way not to die is to raise money?

This old discussion on the Programmers StackExchange might be of interest - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3233/why-do-p...

With that kind of money invested in hosting and scaling, why not get a dedicated professional to handle devops on your team, and go with more traditional hosting solutions? I'm interested in hearing why people still use Heroku at the scale you're describing

Balanced are great and offer way more than stripe with their payouts and marketplace support. We're just waiting for them to add international ACH (IAT) so we can jump ship (they told us it's coming soon).

The original post said that they contacted you through the site you put up, and that you requested sponsorship ranging between $40k and $400k to be associated with this "holiday". That doesn't sound like you were just trying to protect public interest (which is not clear why you would think it is you who should say who can use that name or not).

I'm not sure what the misunderstanding is. Didn't you issue a trademark on a community created idea and then hire a lawyer to enforce it? even if that lawyer made moves not authorized directly by you, this whole incident has a bad taste to it.

The legal issues behind this were posted here a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5449226

The original blog post was removed (for legal reasons?), here is the cached version of it - http://goo.gl/E1gKN

I'm sorry, but that's complete BS. Playing any type of guitar does not limit you to a specific style of play - you can play any style you want on any type of guitar. Some advanced techniques and progressions (i.e, solos or conversly fingerstyle) will be more comfortable on specific guitar types, but there's no technical limitation from playing anything on every guitar type. Those distinctions are mostly meaningless to beginners who will be mostly playing simple chords and melodies (to which I would say, a classical guitar is the most comfortable form factor).

It's certainly not difficult once you are proficient enough. I got my first acoustic after 2 years playing a classical guitar and 1 year playing an electric one. It was very similar to playing a classical guitar once your fingers are broken in.

On the other hand, for beginners which usually struggle at first producing clean sounds, an acoustic presents a much bigger challenge and for no added benefits.

(I've been playing the guitar for 16 years) - beginners should definitely start with a classical guitar, not an acoustic or an electric guitar. Acoustic is the hardest to play correctly, while electric has more setup and cost involved (amplifier, cables, etc). A basic classical guitar is the simplest way to start playing and producing decent sounds.

Not exactly a todo list, but what about Leanspecs? https://www.leanspecs.com

This is a good approach for non technical people, no doubt. That is if it really suites their skillset.

As a non-technical founder, you are likely good at building and maintaining relationships. You are probably good at selling things. You might be great at framing, so people buy into your vision or get excited about your ideas. These are amazing, difficult-to-acquire skills.

Unfortunately, too many non-technical founders do not have those skills. Many people believe that an idea and "hustle" (working hard, being persistent) is enough. Now they just need to find people to build it, people to market it, people to sell it. They have this great idea! the rest will just fall into place.

The OP saw teams that made it through the YC process. Likely, those are not your average non-technical founders. If you do have those skills, then for sure - this is great advice.