
Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive? - Anon84
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/everyblocks-dilemna-how-do-you.html
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pg
We have, and so has Reddit. For any site that could be described as a
community, the people sitting round the table are probably more important than
the shape of the table.

E.g. we don't even have our own search (I recommend
<http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html> if you haven't tried it), but we
do crack down pretty vigorously on trolls and spammers, because they hurt a
site more than lack of features.

~~~
bretthoerner
The difference between Hacker News and Everyblock is that Everyblock needs to
pay six salaries. (I know they have a parent company with cash now, but does
reddit even cover its own hosting and salaries? I honestly don't know.)

There's survive and then there's survive, right?

~~~
bingaman_
Everyblock was funded by a Knight Foundation grant, and I believe still are.

~~~
bretthoerner
Regardless, the grant will end and they will have to generate at minimum six
(decent) salaries worth of revenue. I don't think the grant will last them
much longer. Don't get me wrong, I know most of them in one way or another,
and wish them the best ... but like I said, it isn't exactly like Hacker News
or reddit in the 'survive for the fun / publicity of it' sense.

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inerte
The code is free, but the aggregated data might not :) And the knowledge about
how to aggregate, and how to transform this data.

For example, approach Starbucks, and ask them where do they plan to open new
stores (er... I know SB specifically is closing shops, but the point remains),
and then SELL to them data about the area.

Sure, lots of information are already available on the website. What's to stop
Starbucks to just enter the website and do their research? That's where
intimate knowledge about the data comes in. SB won't ask what the website can
answer. They'll expand the questions, and ask you to convert the data to
Excel, and etc..

Know what business need! And put a line on the sand: Your people will do a lot
of things that are free to consume and use and mashup and all that jazz. But
some of them, you will charge, specially the one-time jobs, or for those rich
enough to pay...

~~~
wallflower
The data on EveryBlock is very nice because it gives the average consumer
access to very useful information like the crime blotter for a ZIP code.

Starbucks' sophisticated demographic analysis most likely far exceeds any data
that EveryBlock would ever offer.

"even searching out parking lots with many oil stains because that indicates
heavy traffic."

Maybe, they even literally wrote the book on it. Arthur Rubinfeld is the
person given credit for managing the expansion of the Starbucks chain from 100
to 4,000 worldwide. [http://www.amazon.com/Built-Growth-Expanding-Business-
Around...](http://www.amazon.com/Built-Growth-Expanding-Business-
Around/dp/0131465740)

<http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08211>

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omouse
You can charge a download fee for the source or binaries. I'd sure as hell pay
$100+ to grab a copy of EveryBlock and host it for my neighbourhood or city.

Also, the neglect to mention the Affero GPL is sad. Check it out
<http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html>

Basically if you release your server-side software under that license, you can
get others to release the changes they make so your own hosted copy will
become better (hopefully):

"The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure
that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the
community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source
code of the modified version running there to the users of that server.
_Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server,
gives the public access to the source code of the modified version._ "

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eli
Well, as others have said, of course you can survive -- there's more to a site
than its codebase.

And second, this isn't exactly a dilemma. They got a grant in exchange for a
promise to open source. Seems like a pretty reasonable deal to me. If you want
to keep it all to yourself, then you've got to pay for the development
yourself.

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jhancock
new product to me. My first impression is that many marketing and election
campaigns might make use of these tools well. Such campaigns shouldn't be
spending lavishly on IT departments and could make use of consulting and other
custom usage by the experts that built the tools.

So the answer to "how to make money off open source?" seems to always lead
back to "consulting and support". Not bad, its just not 100x returns on
licensing, its "just good revenue".

good luck, would like to see tools like this continue to evolve!!

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vivekkhurana
We have enough examples now where a company open sources its product and still
makes money, Redhat, Mysql to name few. You can always open up the base
product and charge for additional features (the freemium model).

You have to create an ecosystem around the product it will be profitable. That
ecosystem can be additional plugins or services around a free software
product. Since free software is based on the concept of sharing the network
effect will kick in, for good products.

If the product is good you will make money immaterial of open source or closed
source nature. In my opinion free software has more stability and performance
but most free softwares are packaged badly (or not packaged at all). When Free
software hackers learn the art of packaging a product and start realizing that
there are others who are going to use the product too, we can should lot more
usable products from open source world.

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alain94040
In the short term, no one will likely bother to copy the code and open a
competing (or even related) site. So business-wise, opening the code doesn't
have any short-term impact.

In the longer term, if they were to become hugely successful, then many people
would love to copy them and having access to the code would make that very
tempting. But "hugely successful" is a big if. By then, they probably would
have enough of a community that copycats wouldn't hurt them too much.

We have been toying with similar ideas for our startup, especially since its
concept lands itself very well to community-based development. No decision
yet.

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wallflower
Yes, it should be a paid iPhone app. And/or charge for per-query REST API
access to a hosted Everyblock data access API.

Bonus points for the iPhone if we can do simple GIS mashups on the fly like
'Show all the schools in the area' or even better allow filters and drill-
downs 'Show all the schools with a graduation rate greater than X%"

------
known
1\. If you focus on customers, you compete with yourself

2\. If you focus on competitors, you compete with competitors

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MaysonL
I wonder how they could compete with, cooperate with, or complement
craigslist?

