
Feed Open Source - substack
http://feedopensource.com
======
bruce511
I think maybe the whole concept here is based on a false premise, and the
solution being offered, even if the premise was true, is a bad one.

First the premise; "software only needs to be paid for once" -in most cases
I'd argue it is. A closed-source package for example (say, like, Windows) is a
simple one-time purchase. Lots of people may be paying, and yes this company
making it makes a profit, but the cost to 1 user is only a tiny fraction of
the cost that it cost to make. Of course most closed-source software doesn't
make money at all, never mind the scale of money windows makes, so Windows is
an outlier here in terms of profit vs cost.

Indeed most companies probably end up making a loss, and going out of
business. Maybe that means the model is broken, or maybe it's just inevitable
that most of the software being created, closed or open, is pretty much crap.

Now to the proposed solution. Which can be summarized as "design by committee"
\- ill put in x$ if you complete feature y which I want. With the community
dictating how much they'll spend and on what, I don't think an elegant well-
thought-out beautiful product will be the result. Designing a whole system is
often best done by the person who has the Vision of where the project is
going, even if it takes 10 years to get there.

Yes, developers need to eat. Which is why the big open-source projects are
funded in some way (like Mozilla is funded by google.) the little projects
tend to get no funding of any kind. And even big projects (like say jquery)
get by mostly on donated programmer time, not cash of their own.

I appreciate that many developers are between a rock and a hard place. They
want to write whatever they like, and not have to work for some employer, but
at the same time they want to get paid. But freedom comes at a price. And
"doing whatever you like" is seldom paid for. And indeed the proposed model
here is suggesting that a bunch of people will become your boss, and tell you
what to do. Which I guess means you might as well just go off and get a job
instead.

~~~
dkuntz2
I think the problem in the premise is right on: while each package is created
once, there are multiple packages which are all different implementations of
the same problem (see Photoshop, Gimp, and all other photo manipulation tools;
or really any genre of software, there are lots of similar pieces of
software).

My bigger qualm is that I'm not sure it's a bad thing that there are multiple
implementations of the same problem. Windows solves the problem of "I need to
work with my computer" in a vastly different way from the *nixs; nginx and
apache solve almost the exact same problem too, and each has different people
using them for different things.

I agree with you that the problem with one solution per problem is that those
solutions will become huge behemoths that nobody wants to work with. It's much
easier to have small, shared libraries than shared programs, especially when
you start tailoring those bigger programs for more and more specific use
cases.

------
amix
I don't agree with the premise. Software isn't a static thing, it's something
that is constantly evolving and creating great software, like creating great
anything, requires a lot of effort, a lot of time and a lot of dedication.
This is what you pay for when you pay for software. You don't pay for the
actual copying of software, you pay for the effort that went into creating it.

Also, designing software and features by "crow-sourcing" is a terrible
approach. Why? Henry Ford said it best “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

------
sheff
I personally would love to be able to donate more to open source (specifically
Postgres and some of its related projects) but I haven't found a way yet which
meets my few simple criteria.

* The money has to specifically go to developers or development and testing related costs, not general advocacy or evangelism.

* It would be nice if donations could go into specific pools, eg in the Postgres example, I might be interested in contributing funds for performance enhancements but have no interest in logical replication.

* Variety of payment methods supported, with annual, repeating donations allowed.

Bountysource ([https://www.bountysource.com](https://www.bountysource.com))
comes close, but rarely has many projects for funding.

Its surprising that in 2014, one of the best ways to supporting open source is
still to select a company which does work on your favourite OSS project and
buy a support contract or something, even though it's not a very efficient
way.

~~~
watwut
Many open source projects that accept donations. Look for "donate" page or
button. Look at homepages of projects you would be willing to pay to.

To be concrete, if you donate to tor, you can choose where the money will go.

------
tonylampada
So, like FreedomSponsors:

[http://freedomsponsors.org/](http://freedomsponsors.org/)

[http://freedomsponsors.org/faq](http://freedomsponsors.org/faq)

[http://freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-
samplers-...](http://freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-samplers-
that-properly-reduce-downsample-and-warp-images)

------
ckdarby
This article was pretty interesting and I figured I'd take a brief moment to
write out something I've been struggling with trying to accomplish in hopes
that maybe someone could shed some light about how to approach it...

I've been trying to come up with a solid way that would fund my minimum
livable income($15000/year) in order to allow me to dedicate 1-2 years full
time to nothing but open source & MIT license projects but finding support for
open source isn't exactly mainstream.

A lot of times when I approach companies/individuals with the idea they
instantly want to know which projects I'd be creating/working on and most
people straight up tell me they wouldn't "fund" someone unless it benefits
directly them which is kind of a shame.

I've been debating attempting a "Kickstater" for something like this because I
think the community in general would benefit greatly from someone in this sort
of position with no ties to other commitments.

~~~
yaddayadda
I'm interested in taking time off to learn programming. Surviving while doing
that is a challenge. One concept I've bounced around is an investment
approach. For example, people could make donations (e.g., $10), with each
increment being "a share" of my future earnings (e.g., 0.1%), potentially for
a limited amount of time (e.g., 10 years).

During the year, I would make blog updates, maintain on open github of
learning projects, and contribute to open projects; and my investors could
make suggestion of things to learn or projects to work on.

As much as I want to do this, I would feel guilty if I did it personally (I
want others in my situation to be able to have similar opportunities), so I've
been trying to figure out how to scale such an approach.

------
sheetjs
> You can't sell software like you sell physical items, software is too easy
> to copy.

You can sell support, which can't be copied in the same way that software can
be copied. And if you are writing open source software with reasonable
traction, most likely there are companies that use the software (that may have
already reached out to you regarding support)

~~~
ianstormtaylor
The problem I see with selling support is that a well-designed tool shouldn't
really require support at all. Ideally the API is clear enough, the
documentation well-written enough, and the scope small enough that support
isn't required or even worth paying for. But as soon as you monetize support,
your incentives aren't nicely aligned with the customers.

~~~
dwiel
The other problem with the support solution is that many programmers dont want
to be tech support people, they want to be programmers. you can hire people to
do the tech suppprt people, but then you become a business person/manager,
rather than a programmer. Even still, building this kind of multiperson
business only makes sense for larger projects. I do think it has its place and
has prooven successful in some situations but its no silver bullet.

------
bd_at_rivenhill
This, but for businesses. Companies should try to avoid e.g. paying something
like $5000 per seat to license AutoCAD; instead the consumers of that
particular type of software should work cooperatively to fund developers who
will build a program with the required features and then release it as free or
open software.

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem is of course how to prevent free riding. Why not just let my
competitors throw their money at producing a high quality free CAD system
while I just sit here and reap the benefits.

~~~
davidw
Exactly.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem)

It's also a 'coordination problem'. If I take the time to make something that
is ready to buy, that's very easy for end users, rather than trying to
coordinate a bunch of people to sit around and wait for something to be
created.

------
moron4hire
There is another fundamental problem with this idea: the planning work that
needs to be done to figure out what to program with this patronage is itself a
lot of work. Project management, requirements analysis, design, testing,
installation, configuration, administration: when done properly, is far, far
more work than the programming itself.

And nobody ever wants to pay for it. Customers buying SAS don't want to pay
for it. Managers at closed-source, boxed-software companies mostly don't want
to pay for it. Managers at consultancies don't want to pay for it, because
clients _bitch and scream_ about paying for it (and then _bitch and scream_
when the software sucks because of a lack of it).

Everyone has this mentality that the only thing worth paying for is the
programmer's fingers pushing keys on a keyboard into a code file. Either a
sea-change on how people view work is necessary, or we need to learn to recast
all that other work as programming in some way.

Unfortunately, I don't see either of those happening anytime soon.

------
drorco
Our startup CodersClan also funds open source projects although from a
different angle. We Crowd-source the support for personal code problems (like
a paid Stack Overflow) and we give a share back to the related Open Source
projects.

[http://www.codersclan.net/authors/](http://www.codersclan.net/authors/)

------
higherpurpose
So kind of like Bithub?

[https://whispersystems.org/blog/bithub/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/bithub/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916751)

~~~
coderzach
From what I understand, not really.

BitHub, funds are put into a pool and distributed evenly to anyone who
commits. Bithub allows someone to donate to the development, without giving it
any direction.

With feedopensource, developers enter into an agreement with a customer, who
pays for a short iteration on a feature or fix of their choosing.
Feedopensource allows someone to pay for _what they want_ developed.

------
dbpokorny
About 20 years ago a small startup called Netscape and a large company called
Sun were supposed to have solved the software problem. Everybody was
predicting the demise of Microsoft. It was thought that with the internet, we
would soon be delivering software over the web instantaneously. "A software
paradise is just a few years away!" we all thought.

Fast forward to today. Netscape is dead, and Javascript is good for posting
photos online and watching videos. And coordinating projects. And this. And
that. But not the basic tasks of what became known as the standard
productivity suite: Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook. These four basic
operations of a computer are still very important. So important that Apple
feels the need to provide its own clones. The relationship between Microsoft
productivity apps and Macintosh computers is rocky to say the least.

Java was supposed to make all of this obsolete, but the promises of Java
security failed to pan out.

The fact remains that a truly plug-in-oriented productivity suite has never
been tried before. If there were any justice in the world, then knock-off
social media apps wouldn't be a hot industry at all; actually useful marginal
functionality for the applications people depend on every day to get work done
would get a huge amount of attention and substantial mind-share in the
developer community.

We don't need to play with the economic model. The exchange of money for
software is fundamentally sounds, as sound as the basic market principles Adam
Smith detailed hundreds of years ago. We don't need new organizational models.
The basic principles of capitalism that formed over the last 200 years are
sound and up to the task.

What we need is infrastructure. New technology. We need a way to deliver
software that is substantially more flexible and adaptable to the user's needs
while ensuring that malicious programs are either impossible to write or
unable to wreak substantial havoc. The process model of today's major
operating systems simply isn't up to the task. What we need are new operating
system and new programming languages.

Sadly, this is very much the case of "we'll know it when we see it". The
C/Unix architecture that dominates today became a success almost in spite of
its creators. What is needed is a new approach, a willingness to consider new
solutions to old problems.

Anyway, if I can play with computer programs the same way I play with legos,
then I'll be happy. And because playing with legos is so simple, this will
lead to a situation where the distinction between programmers and non-
programmers will blur and eventually disappear. But that's a long way off.

------
Jack5500
I've done nothing yet, but pay to do something.

