

Great funding model: Adopt a line of code - geeko
https://getmiro.com/adopt/

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geeko
I think this is a great example on innovation.

"When you adopt, you'll get: an official adoption page, a cute image of your
line of code (watch it grow over the year), badges for your blog or website,
and your name will be listed in the 'about' box in every copy of Miro (more
than 5 million a year and growing)."

I also want a t-shirt with my line of code please :)

~~~
jessep
thanks geeko! we've worked hard on this over the past few weeks.

it's been nearly impossible to get financial support from our community by
simply asking for donations. hopefuly this will make it more fun for people
and turn things around.

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delano
They add a special message below the fold for people in Europe:

"Hello there! It looks like you are visiting from Europe.

Did you know that there are more Miro users in Europe than in the United
States, but more than 99% of our financial support comes from American
donations and philanthropies? Europe loves open-source, right? Help us make
something great!"

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tracy
What if your line of code gets deleted during refactoring?

~~~
bart
Would you adopt any other line of opensource code? Can it be generalized?

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catone
The Tamagotchi funding model... neat. I like the idea, very clever. Though I
wonder what happens to your line of code if it gets deprecated...

~~~
geeko
before:

self.callSomething()

after:

# self.callSomething() /* Don't remove (donated) */

:-)

~~~
diN0bot
the line of code is always there in version control. i wouldn't want to
clutter up a file with unnecessary comments, so maybe those """ Don't remove
(donated) """ lines could be placed in separate files.

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pclark
Christ, $4 a month is a bit steep isn't it?!

~~~
tc
Do you realize how much one line of code, in the Linux kernel for example,
would cost a large organization to write and maintain?

~~~
Shamiq
Actually, I don't. Any estimates?

~~~
ivankirigin
You could estimate this by comparing it to the dev teams behind all Windows
OSes. I don't know the share of MSFT's many tens of thousands of employees
that contribute to the OS. Let's say it's just 2000 FTE. I'm told a good
startup estimate for FTEs is $15K/mo. 2K * 15K * 12 = $360M. Windows XP had
40M sloc, making for $9 / line.

That makes this at least within the right order of magnitude. Then again, this
is an application, not an OS. Also, the linux kernel isn't everything, and XP
isn't the only OS to consider, i.e. maybe Windows Mobile should be included
too.

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flipbrad
It's not a 'great funding model' - frankly, few nonprofits spring to mind that
have found one; my main criticism of this lies in long term interest - the
success of this is buzz-based, and like million dollar homepage, that's going
to pass, maybe sooner than they expect; but it _is_ a nice implementation of
an innovative way to get donations and build attachment to something so
obscure and (to the end user) abstract as the code running software. Miro will
garner a lot of goodwill with this offbeat stunt, that's bound to be a good
thing.

now, who's going to start selling 'adoption' of modules/objects/libs that get
incorporated into lots of other projects? "Hi Daddy, here's where I've made
myself useful this month (links to projects where the snippet is found on
google code/sourceforge/github/etc). By the way, my biological father/mother
has another kid up for adoption!"

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apsurd
That is an incomprehensibly gorgeous page.

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sethg
i = i + 1 # this line sponsored by Ethel Moskowitz in honor of her grandmother

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thalur
silly question: if this is successful, won't it lead to an incentive for the
developers to add unnecessary extra lines of code, sort of an anti-refactoring
- "how can I express this in more lines..." - in order to increase the number
of adoptable lines?

~~~
euccastro
Do you really foresee them running out of lines? "Adopting out"?

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diN0bot
i'd rather see people adopting very small modules. possibly people could bid
on them based on the module elegance and usefulness and extensibility, etc.
lines of code can get removed, whereas concepts tend to stick around, plus
motivating well designed modules is better than motivating greater number of
loc.

every month that goes by without a bug, the module slightly increases in
value, or the donator gets paid a dividend.

~~~
ihumanable
I absolutely love your idea. I think the best thing about it is that it can be
dead-simple or ridiculously complex, with dividends and whatnot, but the idea
works for so many projects.

An added thought could be sponsoring modules that don't exist yet to spur on
their development, maybe your company uses some open source product that
supports a bunch of file formats but not .xyz, you could donate to a
speculative XYZ Module and then everyone benefits and the developers have an
incentive to write it.

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cubicle67
does it cost less to buy a closing brace?

~~~
ken
Miro is written in Python.

~~~
eru
There are still closing braces in Python, because there are still braces in
Python. They just do not tend to have there own line.

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jcapote
Not fair, the ruby people are going to get the least funding!

~~~
randallsquared
If we're going to feel sorry for someone, let's feel sorry for the K, J, and
APL people.

