
Ask HN: Would your business pay for supported open source? - davman
Some larger open source projects run their own commercial support offerings, but smaller projects don&#x27;t tend to have this.<p>Would there be any benefit to a 3rd party company stepping in and offering a paid support contract for a wide variety of open source projects?<p>I&#x27;m guessing that some open source authors don&#x27;t want to get into the legal fuss around paid support, so I&#x27;m wondering if there is a market gap here.
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dgwight
I’m building something along these lines. Rather than offering support
contracts, I am aiming to make doing hourly paid remote support as easy as
possible for open source devs.

As for businesses, Otechie is focused on startups, who often have more money
than time/experience. For me personally, I have often spent days in
frustration, when the right person could have helped me though quickly.

If you’re curious, here’s a link: [https://otechie.com](https://otechie.com)

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davman
Can't see it unfortunately, I'm in the EU!

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Finnucane
It probably wouldn't be worth very much. If, for example, I'm writing a python
app and I import some package from pypi, if that package is relatively small,
and I have some issue with it, I can probably just open the code files and
figure it out. Support for open source projects usually means it's something
large and complex and requiring specialized knowledge or at least beyond your
own, or your project is so large and complex you need outside help getting it
done. Also, suits willing to foot the bill.

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davman
Thanks for the feedback :) I think I was more positioning this as "We have
hundreds of open source dependencies, can I pay someone (x) to support these
all in one go?", mostly due to the proliferation of npm packages!

