
Thoughts on an Open Source Company - jlhamilton
http://damienkatz.net/2010/02/thoughts_on_an_open_source_com.html
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briancooley
The never fire, never layoff policies make it critical to hire the right
people. Wonder if that causes stress. It would keep me awake at night.

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hga
"Critical...?" Yeah, critical in that if you make _one_ particularly wrong
hire (the sort who drags down others, see e.g. the Corncob Antipattern), your
company is _dead_.

One of the things I _always_ checked about a startup I was considering joining
was if they were capable of firing people.

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yungchin
Noble thoughts. I'm not a lawyer, so this is mostly a question: if you're
dealing in open-source only, and your product is service, wouldn't it make
sense to form a partnership firm?

All the things he talks about - a sense of ownership, people managing their
own affairs, shared responsibilities - are made explicit when you do it that
way, right?

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va_coder
Here's a snapshot of their quarterly earnings report:

"Good morning and thank you for your interest in our company. I'm happy to
announce that over the past 3 months we have seen a 5% yoy increase in Git
commits and a whopping 25% increase in refactorings..."

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davidw
I don't know, it all sounds a bit too good to be true. I love working on open
source software myself, so I wish them the best of luck, though, because if it
works out, it sounds like a dream company.

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balu
I really would like to start a company with quite the same rules. Perhaps I
should start by getting my ass up and contributing more to open source
software.

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tjr
I've seen a few open source companies that wound up being successful... when
just starting out, how do you find paying clients to do services for?

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wmf
You start the open source project at your day job, then two years later when
there is a critical mass of potential customers you start the startup.

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marcusestes
They're eventually going to need (and want) someone to run the sales pipeline.

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yungchin
Well maybe not. Professional services companies in other sectors don't always
have sales people - think law and accounting firms, and other types of
consultancies (if the comparison seems odd, see my earlier question about
partnership firms). I guess it depends whom you cater to.

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marcusestes
Good point. But often I imagine that even these old-world service firms tend
to see specialization of labor from the partners, and somebody ends up holding
the sales bag. I just think most software companies as idealistic and
technical as this one will probably wish to have someone else attend to all
the messy pre-sale human interaction once they reach a certain scale. If only
to provide a clean signal of the right opportunities, shorn of noise.

