
An open letter on side projects - ingve
https://pippinsplugins.com/an-open-letter-on-side-projects/
======
jdreaver
> This is what I believe: if you build a side project and allow real customers
> to purchase it, you have a moral obligation to support and maintain it
> properly and if you are unable to fulfill that obligation, then it is your
> obligation to shutter the project or find a new owner who can amply care for
> it.

I agree with the core idea of this quote: don't take people's money and run
away, _especially_ if you led them to believe you will support a paid product
for a long time.

However, I wouldn't say that supporting every paid product you make is a
_moral obligation_. Just because a couple of people paid you $20 doesn't mean
you should force yourself to spend your valuable time improving and
maintaining the product _if you no longer benefit_ (through joy or money).
Certainly, you shouldn't defraud people and lead them to believe you will
maintain a product for a long time, but this kind of blanket statement might
scare away people from trying to create a paid service because of the fear of
having to perpetually support a handful of users.

Again, I agree with the principle in particular cases, but there are cases
where it doesn't apply (at least in my opinion).

~~~
marcosdumay
That's how I read the article: you either maintain it, or don't promise you
will and stop billing.

Looks reasonable to me.

~~~
crpatino
What if you build it, commercialize it and maintain it for several years, and
then the market shifts and it becomes impossible to keep producing revenue out
of it?

Does the customer that paid a single fee once have the right to claim a share
of your time on perpetuity so you can keep maintaining it? Or is it fair to
change your business model so you charge yearly fees for support/maintenance?

What if most customers don't want to pay the yearly subscription fee but a
handful of them do? Are you still morally obligated to support them, even if
their money barely cover costs?

~~~
6d0debc071
If I have a service level agreement with you, paid for up front, then wilfully
violating that agreement strikes me as the sort of thing I could take you to
court over and stand a decent chance of winning. You got the money earlier,
allowing you to do some things that you otherwise couldn't, and in return for
that took on certain liabilities.

That you may eventually have to pay for those liabilities with a few hours of
your time here and there does not absolve you of the agreement that you
wilfully entered into in order to obtain those benefits. That risk was in
large part what you were paid for.

If you're going to gamble, yeah. Sometimes you lose.

Mind you, this whole thought experiment is a bit silly. If you're going to
form this sort of agreement, then you should define equitable exit conditions
to manage risk in the event that you're dramatically wrong. At the very least,
I'd want a significant portion of my money back if I paid for 'forever' (not
decidable, so that might not even be a legal contract depending on your
jurisdiction) and got a couple of years.

~~~
crpatino
What service level agreement? Most licenses for freemium apps sale the product
"as is".

I agree that candid people may make binding promises that they were in no
position to fulfill, sometime not even noticing. And I agree they have to pay
for that mistake. However, you cannot force them to derail their lives for it.

There are bankruptcy laws for people who over spend money, so they can cut
their looses and not end up being debt slaves for the rest of their lives. And
the lenders who are foolish enough to give money to someone who is obviously
not solvent to pay back are at least partially responsible. Why should it be
different for creative works?

~~~
6d0debc071
I'm not convinced that there is much benefit in having a long discussion on
this point, so I shall make a reply and then let things fall as they may:

Bankruptcy protection (much abused at that) is generally only available to
people or companies who have exhausted their financial resources in an attempt
to meet their obligations. It is not a protection that is available to people
who simply cannot be bothered to put in an effort out of a plentiful account
to meet the obligations that they have taken upon themselves.

It is similar for creative works. If you attempt to keep something updated,
make a reasonable effort to do so, and that simply becomes infeasibly
expensive to continue doing without suffering some form of serious ruin, then
that's fair enough. You made a reasonable attempt to meet your obligations,
were wrong in your estimation of them, and being wrong shouldn't cost you
everything you have. You didn't deal with your customer in, for lack of a
better term, "bad faith" when you formed the implicit and/or declared contract
upon which your deal wrested.

Mistakes happen, people should attempt to ameliorate the consequences of that
mistake to a reasonable amount in order to meet the obligations that they have
taken upon themselves and keep the strength and value of their word, their
ability to make commitments to others in the world, high.

That is, I feel, different from simply deciding that one is not going to make
a _profit_ out of an obligation that they have taken upon themselves. And the
strength of one's word is reflected in how much one will suffer in order to
keep the obligations that one has formed. As is the value of any deal that
someone might make with someone in the future. Someone's word is worth nothing
when it is kept only in so far as it benefits them to keep it, and broken the
next moment. I am unlikely to pay someone any sum of money, and would
certainly not suffer them as an employee, if their attitude to their word, and
the impressions that people could reasonably be expected to take away from
what they said – the deals they made – was that they simply stopped trying to
keep it the minute it ceased to be to their benefit to do so.

Most people do not act in that manner, if they did the strength of someone's
word would be almost meaningless and no deals would be made since the client
could never expect to benefit from them.

#

As for the idea of selling something "as is", contract law is not that simple.
If it were, then outside of situations in which both parties had significant
forms of leverage, all goods and services would be exchanged only on an "as
is" basis. We would find ourselves in a situation similar to the one that used
to concern rail travel: in which terms and conditions absolutely removing any
responsibility that the rail company had towards their passengers safety were
found on the back of rail tickets. Insofar as one desires to be able to form
valuable contracts, to trade things of value, one should desire to live in a
system that enforces a certain lower bounds upon the behaviour of parties, and
the equability of contracts that can be formed, within that system.

Consequently, while I don't pretend to understand it anywhere near entirely,
there will almost doubtless be limitations on the disclaimers that you can
place on various implied warranties (though this depends upon the relative
jurisdictions governing the contract at the time it's formed.) If one were
relying on writing, "as is" on a piece of paper, and getting the client to
sign it, as a means to escape their obligation with regards to their client's
statutory rights, I would not much care for their chances.

Most notably, as a matter of general principle, (and here we run into a
problem, for the law may be different where you are,) it tends to be the case
that one cannot form a contract entirely for one's own benefit. That is a
contract, to be valid, must be equitable. A contract to the effect of "you
shall give me your money, and in return I have no obligation to provide a good
or service to you." Is clearly almost entirely, if not outright, to your
benefit – and certainly of little to no benefit to your "customers" who in
return for their money have no entitlement to any benefits nor access to
reasonable redress in the even that they are denied something that you
knowingly allowed them to form the impression they would receive. Likewise,
contracts generally have to be decidable, that is to say that I cannot form a
contract with you that goes something to the effect of, "as long as I want" or
"as long as it is to my benefit." It simply does not matter what you choose to
put in the contract if the contract itself is void, or voidable due to abuse
of certain principles enshrined in the underlying statutes or common law that
allow the formation of contracts to take place.

Of course, if one buys a used car from a shady salesman, one has little hope
of redress through the courts when it turns out that one was not being dealt
with in good faith. That has more to do with the difficulty of making law
apply to them, then it does a matter of principle or of justice. It strikes me
that apps, for smart phones, (distinguished because Microsoft seems to be
calling desktop programs apps these days,) bear significant similarities to
the shady used-car salesman model. That strikes me as neither a moral nor a
legal argument though - it strikes me more as an 'I can get away with it'
argument.

------
pnathan
I'm not sleeping 4 hours a night. That's a fundamentally great way of
exploding my job, my relationships, and my health. This article kinda
glorifies killing that boundary even though it's unhealthy to.

I have this commitment to myself: when I contract with customers, I will give
them realistic SLAs as part of the deal; I will promise I will take care of
them within that SLA.

------
diggan
This seems in general misguided...

> There is, however, a scenario where leaving a side project to die is not
> okay: when you make money from it. Whether you sell it as a service or a
> product, the moment you accept any form of obligatory payment for your side
> project, there is a fundamental obligation you have to maintain it.

I do not agree with this. Just because you make money of something doesn't
make you have a obligation to maintain it. Who are you to decide this? If my
__side project __happens to be good enough that I can charge for it and some
people pay, doesn 't mean I want to maintain it for the rest of my life. Once
I'm bored of it or feel I want time for other side projects, I'll stop
maintaining it. Because I can't maintain everything.

Seems like the authors problem is that he assumed that side projects are solid
projects that will be there forever and he payed for that assumption. Rather,
research what you are paying for, before you make the payment. And if there is
a real interest for the people behind it to maintain it, and they communicate
that they will be around, THEN it's a bad thing to just drop it.

~~~
s73v3r
I believe the opposite. If you're making money off of it, then you do have a
moral obligation to support it, at least to the point where they can use it
under the original circumstances they were sold it under. The idea that one
could charge for a product and completely disappear with the customer's money
is extremely unprofessional, and quite frankly makes it much harder for the
rest of us to sell software.

~~~
diggan
Sure, as I said in the comment before, agreeing to stick around and charge for
a service then running away is clearly a dick move. Charging for something
monthly and then one month decide you want to do other things, is not a dick
move.

If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I
decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your
apartment?

~~~
markdown
> Charging for something monthly and then one month decide you want to do
> other things, is not a dick move.

It most certainly is a dick move if you know you have customers who depend on
the service. To avoid being a dick, provide your users more notice.

> If you pay me to clean your apartment for two months but the third month I
> decide to do something else instead, do I have to keep cleaning your
> apartment?

Of course you don't, but to avoid being a dick, provide adequate notice, with
_adequete_ being enough time to find a replacement. If I had a party on the
2nd day of month 3 with an expectation you'd be cleaning the apartment on day
1 only to be told on the 1st that you wouldn't be doing it, that would be a
dick move.

\------

Essentially it comes down to providing enough notice to find a replacement.
The time needed to do that obviously depends on the service, but I can think
of many cases where a months notice is less than acceptable.

~~~
diggan
The service is a side project. It's something half baked (maybe not always
half baked, but often) you did because you thought it was fun to do. If
someone is depending on my side project, I'm not gonna take responsibility for
you making a bad decision to depend on a service that people make as a side
project.

Of course, if we're talking "real" projects/services, it's different. But now
we're talking about side projects. Something you do on the side.

I'm not against letting your users know that you're shutting down with a good
amount of time before. What I'm against is that someone saying (the linked
blogpost for example) that I HAVE TO maintain my side project because someone
decided to depend on it.

~~~
thetmkay
It's a matter of communication and self-representation.

You may think it's naive for someone to rely on your side project, but from
their perspective they may never have known it was a side project. It may just
look like a normal legitimate paid service, with a reasonable expectation of
duty of care.

A consequence of the plethora of great dev tools/services out there is that
it's relatively easy to produce a professional looking website, and thus
increasingly difficult to tell whether said site represents a business or a
side project (especially with wannabe start-ups, who commonly promote and
advertise MVP services with landing pages only to pivot soon after). There
should be some accountability for properly 'cleaning up/closing up' a
business.

I don't think the OP said anything about having to maintain in perpetuity -
just that there is an implicit social contract (and sometimes legal) to clean
up a side project with due care when you take money.

In an ideal world, there would always be some care - but realistically
speaking, the most appropriate line in the sand is paid/free.

------
Riseed
> There is, however, a scenario where leaving a side project to die is not
> okay: when you make money from it.

I disagree. The key factor is not the money, but the promise (whether
expressly stated or obviously implied). I'm 1000x more upset about a "free
forever" service balking than an app politely going dark or charging for a
major version upgrade.

There's an obligation to honor guarantees and remaining time on billed
subscriptions, to be clear about supported OS versions (e.g. unfair to break
on 10.11 if you list 10.7+), to assist customers with exporting their data
when you retire, etc.

Do not make yourself a slave. If the project is a money-sink, be honest about
raising rates, cutting features, or shutting down. If the passion is gone, be
honest about passing the torch or going dark. There will always be haters, but
trust that most people will understand (though silently), and that you also
have a very important obligation to support and maintain yourself.

------
sideproject
If you ever find yourself abandoning your side projects, then give
[http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com) a go. A plenty of
people have sold and bought side projects. It's been my .. side project for
awhile. :)

~~~
justboxing
I was looking for a site / service such as yours. Love it! Any stats on
success rates, esp of Sideprojects that were looking for co-founders?

Also, do you "vet" the submissions? Ex: Here's a SnapChat clone for sale for
just $15. There's even a comment from a user asking if price is real.
[https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/2571/flash-
ch...](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/2571/flash-chat)

And here's another one. I saw a Craiglist meets Instagram iOS App that is on
App Store, and seems like a real lot of work, that is for sale for just $50.
[https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/3424/instagra...](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/3424/instagram-
mets-craiglist-style-app)

And your search is not working. I searched for "Poshmark" to locate the above
link to the 'instagram-mets-craiglist-style-app' App project and I get 0
results (the word Poshmark is in that listing)

Here's the URL
[https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home#search/all/all/a...](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home#search/all/all/all/all/all/all/all/all/poshmark/all/10/20)

------
udev
Gist of article:

I made it, therefore listen to me.

I came up with this idea that you should continue maintaining a side project
once someone paid you for the benefit of using it.

Remember, I made it in life, and therefore my idea is right.

~~~
logfromblammo
As a point of fact, 17-21 credit-hours at a university does _not_ translate to
8 hours per day in class, plus additional study time.

A credit-hour is roughly the amount of time you spend in class per week. At my
university, most classes were 3 credit-hours. This was usually 1 hour on
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, or 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If
you have 20 credit-hours in one semester, you are spending 4 hours per weekday
in classes, not 8.

Depending on your aptitude for the subject, you may spend an equal amount of
time studying or working on assignments outside of classes as you spend in
them. But if you pay attention in lecture, and are evaluated mostly by exams,
you might not need to spend _any_ additional time.

And I will not be taking any time management advice from anyone who admits to
getting only 4 hours per night of sleep, thank you very much. This dude should
have dropped his second part-time job, and cut the time spent dating in half,
or less. And now that we're at it, he should have studied petroleum
engineering instead of linguistics. And instead of attending KU, he should
have gone to MIT. And his side projects should have been Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and Dropbox.~

Other people are not you. The things you did to succeed won't necessarily work
for anyone else. They might not even work for you more than once.

~~~
udev
In my case a 3-credit class in Engineering program included the following:

\- 3h lecture / week,

\- more often than not weekly/semi-weekly homework assignment (at least 4h to
complete),

\- optional weekly lab work (1-2h),

\- optional 1 or 2 midterms,

\- optional projects/presentations/demos/competitions,

All of the above included in the 3 credits.

Unlike what you say, a 20 credit course load is not 4h work per day. It is
much more work.

~~~
logfromblammo
Let's not argue over words that were not used when we have the ones that
_were_ used so close at hand.

Quoted from article:

    
    
      > Throughout my four years at the university, I took 
      > 17-21 credit hours per semester. In plain English,
      > that means I was in classes for 8 hours per day
      > followed by several hours of studying each night.
    

A 3-credit class is 3 hours in the classroom per week, plus additional time
outside of class. The amount of additional time spent outside the classroom
varies, but it is not time spent in the classroom. _21 divided by 5 is not
anywhere close to 8_.

In plain English, author overstated time spent in classes by a factor of 2.

~~~
dragonwriter
> A 3-credit class is 3 hours in the classroom per week, plus additional time
> outside of class.

The usual rubric I've seen is that each credit class in the normal system is 3
hours total time per week, the most common arrangements for that 3
hours/credit are 1 hour lecture + 2 hours assumed out-of-class time for 1
credit, or 3 hours lab for one credit (this may be combined in a lecture + lab
course, which might have 10 credits for 5 hours of weekly lecture, 10 hours of
presumed out-of-class time accompanying the lecture, and 15 hours of weekly
labs.)

A quick check of some online college course catalogs confirms that this
appears to be approximately the usual rubric (at least to the extent of 1 hour
lecture/week = 1 credit, 3 hours lab/week = 1 credit; the assumed out-of-class
time for lecture is not explicit in any catalogs I can find.)

So, depending on the mix of lecture and lab (and assuming no less-common
patterns are involved), and assuming (as you do with the division by 5) that
all the in-class time involved is on weekdays, 17-21 credit hours corresponds
to somewhere between 3.4 and 12.6 hours a weekdays of in-class time.

So, 8 hours per day of in-class is not inconsistent with a 17-21 credit load,
but it would be a higher lab-to-lecture ratio in terms of credits.

I don't think your unequivocal statement that the in-class time is inflated by
a factor of 2 is justified.

~~~
logfromblammo
Given the author of the article stated that he was a linguistics major, please
speculate on the labs that this person might have taken.

My minor in cognitive science was administered by a three-way alliance between
the computer science, linguistics, and psychology departments, and nary a one
of them required more time in the classroom per week than the number of credit
hours. None. The psych professors, of course, dragooned their students into
the psych testing pool for a maximum of two hours per semester, but that was
not graded, nor in a classroom.

My chemistry lab sections were all 1 credit-hour, and we spent more time than
that every week in the chem lab, which I am willing to count as a "classroom"
for the purposes of extending the benefit of the doubt.

Classroom time = lecture + 3 x lab . So in order to be in class 8 hours per
day, or 40 hours per week, we get this system of equations:

    
    
      40 = lec + 3 x lab
      21 = lec + lab
    
      lec = 21 - lab
      40 = 21 + 2 x lab
      19 = 2 x lab
      9.5 = lab, 11.5 = lec
    

Wow, that's a lot of lab sections. When I got my chem minor, each 3-hour
lecture section had an accompanying one-hour lab section. The work done in it
overlapped substantially with the out-of-class work expected for the lecture.

You didn't do very much homework for the lecture section. You mostly did the
lab work from the lab section. Rather than doing your homework in the dorm,
you did it at the bench or the fume hood. So even if you counted time in the
lab as "in the classroom", that's still 4 credit-hours for the class, 3 in the
lecture, 3 in the lab, and _maybe_ up to six in your room if you really had
trouble understanding the material.

So I still have to wonder how someone studying linguistics in general and Maya
in particular managed to rack up so many hours "in the classroom" per week.

Degree requirements: [http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/degree-
requirements4...](http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/degree-
requirements497)

Course catalog: [http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-
bin/6254](http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/6254)

I was unable to identify any possible lab sections other than possibly
LING120: The Physics of Speech, for 4 credit-hours, and maybe LING 980:
Linguistics Field Work, which seems unlikely for an undergrad. Everything else
looked like lectures.

Are you just winding me up here? _Nobody_ takes half their course load as
labs. Even if you did all hard science classes, you're still only going to end
up with no more than 25% your course load credit-hours as lab sections [as an
undergrad], which gets you _maybe_ 6 hours "in the classroom" per day. That's
still not 8. I don't think you can convince me that number is not bullshit
without the author's actual class schedule.

------
pzone
Yeah, it's a little shitty to take money and not maintain something if people
are expecting you to.

So tell them upfront you might not maintain it indefinitely.

Moral obligation: satisfied! ️

------
enginnr
Side projects start to bit rot if the creator stops caring for them with a
full heart. Like anything, if you're not committed to something, it becomes a
second class citizen, and in the worst case simply becomes abandoned.

The only person who can sustain a side project long into the future is the
creator. Not the people who support it via donations, or buy an item...You and
_only_ you are responsible for its shelf-life.

------
acveilleux
The thin font and lack of contrast gave me a headache.

~~~
radnor
Agreed. I don't understand why some blogs embrace that kind of styling.

I use a 'zap stylesheets' bookmarklet to make sites like that readable again:

javascript:(function(){var
i,x;for(i=0;x=document.styleSheets[i];++i)x.disabled=true;})();

------
pjc50
TLDR: don't do side projects. Unless you have an unlimited reserve of time and
energy.

~~~
quanticle
That's not the lesson I got from the article. The lesson I got was, "Don't
charge money for your side projects." If you write some software as a side
project and give it away (as open source, or whatever), you have a much lower
level of obligation to support the code. In the worst case you can tell the
person complaining to fix it themselves and submit a patch.

------
kyberias
You may love your side projects. But we don't love the contrast of the text on
your blog. Come on now, no light gray text on white background!

------
a3voices
There is not a moral obligation to maintain side projects. If the users want
the maintenance so badly, they can pay you large amounts of money for it.

~~~
s73v3r
It sounds like people were paying for the side project.

