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I like open source and I understand you have to make a business case for it but this just feels depressingly like "Open-source your startup so you don't have to pay for employees"



Definitely understand the sentiment there, but at least for us, it's not working out like that. Our first contributor is also our first developer hire, and we have another contributor we are negotiating with to have him do some contract work for us. If anything, it's encouraged us to hire more.

Our move to open source is basically a statement that the people behind a product are where the value is actually built, and so from our perspective, it is of the utmost importance to treat people fairly. If you have any experience with running a big open source project, I'd love to chat with you to see if there are any non-obvious pitfalls we can avoid. You can email me at george@codecombat.com


What's depressing about that? If people feel they want to voluntarily contribute, how is that not a win-win?


I think he's just bringing up the very real point that we're a for profit company, but accept free work from highly skilled developers. We are almost hyper aware of the need to balance the community and company profitability. The last thing we want is for people to feel exploited, and we think that we can be transparent enough to make that work. But to ignore the risk entirely would be hubris. :)




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