
A challenge to startups - jsnell
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-12-18-startup-challenge.html
======
moeamaya
Thank you Colin for writing this. I think it's necessary to champion how much
we rely on Open Source to encourage giving back.

This has been a very recent topic at our company that was bootstrapped early
this year and now is humming along nicely. We are formally implementing an
Open Source Friday each month (would love to do every Fri, but company not
doing quite that well). We're suggesting three avenues, but we're not limiting
it to these:

1\. Contributing design (we're trained designers that also develop) work to
projects we actively and implicitly use.

2\. Open sourcing our own novel technologies and working on documentation,
issues, and community.

3\. IF (there better be a good reason) we have to work on this Friday, half of
the revenue for the day will be donated to supporting Open Source Software.

We'd also love to hear ideas from others on ways designers could help out the
Open Source community.

------
Animats
_" How lucky I was to be running a startup company now rather than two decades
ago."_

In some ways, it's harder. Two or three decades ago, there was a huge software
vacuum - there were obvious niches no one had filled yet. If you could build
it, they would come. Now, there's something for almost every niche, no matter
how obscure. Also, the price point for software is way down. People complain
about $5 now, when they used to be willing to pay $95.

Yes, today anybody can do a startup. There's even "Startups for Dummies"[1]
It's easy to get the component services, from hosting to credit card
processing. So everybody is doing it.

Most phone apps lose money for their creators. Small ad-supported sites are
much less successful than they used to be. It's worse than starting a
restaurant, the previous way to spend time and money and go broke.

Yes, there are big winners, but not very many of them.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Online-Start-Ups-For-
Dummie...](http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Online-Start-Ups-For-Dummies-
ebook/dp/B008TSC4UE)

------
tobbyb
I am not quite sure I totally agree with the authors view of 'giving back' but
this is a much needed article and we need more of this. I think it's a bit
risky to conflate start ups and businesses that are solving problems with
'giving back'. Let's celebrate these startups for innovating, solving problems
and being successful, but let's not mix that up with 'giving back'.

Giving back would be getting involved in social causes, solving problems for
free with no expectation of any return, and in this context giving back to the
open source community. Stripe is awesome but in this context it would be great
to hear about how they are supporting open source projects they are built on
than how they are solving problems in payment processing.

Open source funding is a bit of a mess at the moment. There is a huge lacuna
on how to highlight startup companies (and thus encourage others) that are
successfully built on open source contribute back. Companies that use open
source should at least have a page listing the projects they are using and how
they are giving back. There is no visibility or any initiative that tracks and
encourages this positively. Without focus and organization nothing happens.
Another important thing is giving back should be simple funding for open
source projects and not hiring the developers or adding developers. That seems
to be more about gaining influence than supporting the project for everyone.

The more worrying thing is a general lacuna of user representation in open
source in an organized fashion, developer funding of popular and interesting
projects that are not a part of the startup scene and just general funding.
The inevitable result is open source will if it's not already, be hijacked by
corporate interests. Ultimately money makes its own agenda, and if users do
not secure their interests others will.

~~~
cperciva
I don't think the public good and making a profit are unable to coexist. Y
Combinator has greatly aided startups, but has made a great deal of money in
the process; Stripe and Amazon Web Services are very much the same.

To be sure, there are some causes which can operate as charities; but if your
goal is to simplify credit card processing for startups, can it be achieved in
any manner other than in the form of a corporation? My own startup falls into
the same category: I wanted the world to have a solid, secure, online backup
service for geeks, and it turned out that a company was the only natural way
for Tarsnap to exist.

While I absolutely agree about the importance of open source software -- and
that's how I've primarily given back to the community -- I don't think all the
other ways people improve the world are in any way diminished by the fact that
they make a profit in the process.

------
sandGorgon
I asked this last year and got no replies
-[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863782)

What are good tech projects to donate to in 2016?

~~~
JoshTriplett
How about the organization that supports Git, QEMU, Samba, and a pile of other
projects?
[https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/](https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/)

------
staunch
Creating better technology in the world is giving back.

~~~
panic
Technology is not always positive! Do you think the people who designed and
built Room 641A were giving back?

~~~
pyvpx
I don't know -- I think we're all pretty lucky to have had the advances in
optical technology and associated manufacturing of said technology that
allowed 641A to exist.

------
sarciszewski
I'm going to do nothing this year, neither for startups nor for open source
software, because it's hard to draw water out of a dry well. And I feel
shittier about that after reading this post.

I hope 2016 is better.

~~~
cperciva
Please don't feel bad about this. The challenge wasn't to _do_ something; it
was to _think_ about what you can do. If the answer is "I can't do anything to
help right now", that's a perfectly legitimate answer.

~~~
sarciszewski
Yeah, but it's the same answer I would have had if you posted this last year
too. That's what makes me feel shitty.

The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in
popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and
nothing special, really.

~~~
irremediable
> The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in
> popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and
> nothing special, really.

I wish I could reach through the screen, grab you by the shoulders, and shout:
"THAT IS _NOT_ PAR FOR THE COURSE! THAT IS A _CONTRIBUTION_! YOU HAVE DONE
GOOD! FEEL GOOD FOR DOING GOOD!"

You are blinding yourself to the value of what you have done. Please, let
yourself feel happy about it.

~~~
sarciszewski
It's kind of hard to feel happy about something that:

    
    
        - Takes very little time or energy
        - Makes you no income
        - Doesn't usually lead to friendships
        - Doesn't require much intelligence, to be truthful
    

There's no self-actuation, no challenge, no engagement, and ultimately no
reward.

It's just become routine, something I do to pass the time when not writing
code for a client or when I need to unwind after a long day.

I'm aware that it's a contribution and it does matter to some people, but I'll
never capture any of those $ of value anyway so it's hard to get worked up
over it.

I think the most valuable thing I've done for open source in the past year was
send the guy who runs dotdeb one of the items on his Amazon wish list as a
thanks for making the release candidates for PHP 7 available on Debian Jessie.

In the grand scheme of things, the needle remains unmoved.

~~~
protomyth
and yet, your action prevented multiple someones from encountering a bug and
took a little entropy out of the system...

Thanks for preventing others from experiencing a bit of pain.

------
vox_mollis
Dispiriting. Colin is not bad at business. If he ran tarsnap like Patrick
suggests, it would be a step back.

I don't understand what, exactly, drives Patrick on this crusade to maximize
financial rewards for "our kind".

~~~
cperciva
Is this intended to be a response to Patrick's blog post from last year?

~~~
vox_mollis
It is, and apologies for being offtopic, but you linked to it in this post.

On-topic: our business did our standard EFF donation, but after reading this,
we'll do more.

~~~
cperciva
_apologies for being offtopic_

No need to apologize, I just wasn't sure if it was deliberate or if you had
clicked through and forgotten where you were on the stack.

------
humanrebar
> the demands of the Occupy movement that the "1%" pay higher taxes.

Those demands are purely class warfare, though. They're ceremonial, not
serious proposals to fix inequality or budget issues.

Maybe I'm wrong. Show me some serious proposals that can improve the
circumstance of the poor or close the deficit based on taxing the 1%.

The broader point is well taken, though -- that we expect people with
disposable time and money to use some of it to benefit mankind.

EDIT: I'm getting some downvotes, probably for the politics? (I didn't bring
it up). The point is that the other examples are about the need to make a
difference. The Occupy demands are substantially not. I wouldn't mind hearing
contrary thoughts on this.

