

Helm: Open Source Real Time Discussions - frankwiles
http://www.indiegogo.com/helm

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petercooper
Interesting times! It seems to be increasingly popular that developers are
trying to raise money so they can _start_ open source projects.

It's impossible to say how this trend will work long term but I suspect a lot
of the open source software I love today wouldn't exist if it had relied upon
raising $50k up front.. not only because of the likelihood of raising the cash
but because the lesser extrinsic motivation suggests, perhaps, that there was
more intrinsic motivation for developing and releasing those projects?

I think it's great if proven projects take donations or sponsorship to kick
things up another notch or to support full time developers, but merely to
_start_ a project? I'm on the fence about that, and will be interested to see
how it plays out as a model.

~~~
izak30
For those not a part of the Django community: Toastdriven is not new, Daniel
Lindsley is a staple for us. Haystack and Tastypie on their own are wonderful
projects with untold hours of unpaid OSS. This is more of a full-stack project
than either of those, but I have a huge amount of faith in their ability to
execute, given the time required. I would much rather see them working on OSS
than consulting, it's better for everybody (except maybe clients who can't
have them exclusively)

~~~
petercooper
Just so it's clear, I don't question the sincerity, stature or trustworthiness
of these guys. They come across well in their video. My lines of thought are
about the project, not them personally.

What I find confusing is why a big upfront investment is necessary merely to
_start_ the project and, perhaps more importantly, why it wouldn't be a true
open source project and only open sourced at the end. Why not open source what
they have already and see if it sells itself by attracting collaborators?

It's not clear from the page or the video if they've open sourced the work
done on the prototype already, but if they have and people are already playing
with it and seeing promise, it becomes a much easier sell. Many good open
source projects got significant sponsorship or raised money for people to work
on them after initially proving itself, and that's great.

~~~
jvoorhis
Your concerns are valid. It costs nothing but a few minutes to start an open
source project. Projects of this scope, however, do benefit from some amount
of early design and planning. After reading PHK's recent rant [1], and
reflecting on Brooks's idea of "surgical teams" [2], I wonder if some initial
work in isolation is such a bad thing.

Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred
in some weird new way.

[1] <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257>

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-
Month#The_surg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-
Month#The_surgical_team)

~~~
petercooper
_Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being
blurred in some weird new way._

A response from the people running the project leads me to believe this is
true. Essentially it seems they're seeking funding for their product _but_ the
open sourcing of the project is a big cherry on top (rather than it being
purely an "open source project").

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jrussbowman
Hmm. I already built something similar at chatfor.us

I used tornado load balanced by haproxy for the Web servers instead of Django.
Backend is mongodb and I use a small tornado driven zeromq to manage passing
updates between the front ends real time. That router also does all the db
writes.

I built it in my spare time (and it shows) just to have a place to take
twitter conversation to get around the 140 character limit

Not sure why you would need to seek funding to open source something like
this. Today's frameworks make it pretty easy. Is there really enough need for
another chat server? One motivation for me was to play with zeromq and tornado
together. There are already other more robust and stable chat solutions out
there. I never even considered there would be enough interest in it to open
source my app.

~~~
toastdriven
Sounds interesting, though I wouldn't trust MongoDB with my (or anyone else's)
data.

The problem is that, while building the core of this is easy-ish, the end
result should be something very complete & easy to stand up. Our prototype
functions (barely, mostly just due to a lack of time), but it's not polished
or complete. It's not smooth, easy to use/administer & it doesn't include all
the little details that go into successful software projects.

~~~
jrussbowman
Gotcha, I guess I was thinking more along the lines of open source project
than actual product. Based on the replies above I see where you're going now.
Good luck.

Not sure if you're coming back to read this, but I'm curious about why django?
Did you choose it because of your comfort level with it or are there
advantages django offers for this kind of app? I built a few things with
django a while back before I moved on to tornado for everything. Not because
django was bad, tornado was just a better fit for what I've been building.

~~~
toastdriven
Partially due to familiarity, partially due to other projects. Django will be
handling the standard webapp things (registration, serving archives, etc). To
be clear, there will be a lot of plain Python code handling the other aspects,
with a goal being that you could relatively easily replace the Django parts
with your favorite tech stack (say Flask or Tornado). Smaller parts making a
greater whole.

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pydanny
This is going to be awesome. Daniel Lindsley always delivers seriously good
stuff.

------
zzygan
I just finished installing helm in emacs. Of course its something completely
different. Always confusing when something open source appears that has the
same name as something else entirely. Not that it matters overall.
<http://emacs-helm.github.com/helm>

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dchuk
you'd think if you were asking for $50,000 you could at least take some time
to create a simple mockup of how the software will look and work...

~~~
toastdriven
That's in the video (~1m0s mark). The prototype is present, but
ugly/unfinished. We could put it up publicly, but it wouldn't represent the
final product anyhow.

~~~
dchuk
wow, I'm an ass, sorry. I honestly stopped the video at like 55 seconds.

Carry on

