Show HN: Ringer – Get and provide expert help on Open Source Software

As someone who is trying to make a living out of free software, I would love to see this project succeeding.

The other remotely similar service, Tidelift, has unacceptable terms and conditions: for the compensation they decide "at [their] sole discretion", "[i]f you do not satisfactorily provide the Services, Tidelift may, at its option and without limitation, (a) require you to immediately re-perform the applicable Service at no additional charge; and/or (b) reduce the fees paid, or due to be paid, to you for the applicable Service in an amount commensurate with the cost to the Subscriber to cover the breach and/or the cost to Tidelift to assist its Subscriber with covering the breach." Quotes taken from the May 2022 "Lifter Agreement", which I was asked to sign for the monthly equivalent of what a professional charges for 30 minutes of work.

I hope that Ringer will prove a real contact point between Free Software professionals and professional users.

Hey dvarrazzo - we're making a real effort to talk to the developer side when we're structuring contracts and at the moment (until it's unscalable) will be manually involved (behind the scenes) in each one to make sure it fits. Getting this right is absolutely vital - a balanced contract that serves both parties equally is the only way I see of retaining good customers and incredible talent. If you have any other thoughts or want to discuss at length I'd be happy to hear - email in my bio!

Very cool. Once you have the devs in place, there are a bunch of extras you could build in to attract the big boring enterprise customers. Personnel level things like background checks, work location, quality certification would allow devs to get into smaller, more expensive pools that some orgs want to pay for. Technical solutions to make it safe & secure to have short-term contractors collaborate on your infrastructure would also be helpful.

There's probably a content marketing side of this as well. If you really have the experts on a wide variety of open source projects, you could write high quality "when to choose X" blog posts. You could back that up with various measures of project health, host round tables where people discuss competing projects they have experience with, etc.

Hi foxhop - at the moment, yes. We've had conversations with people about GitLab, Gitea, BitBucket, SourceHut and others and we'd like to support them, and self hosted, in time. For now we're constrained by resources though so I can't put a timeline on other services!

I sincerely wish you well on this. I guess I'll sign up as a "ringer" for my repos. I'd suggest some way to do a bulk add (may already be there, as I haven't had a chance to explore). I have over 40 public repos, and I know of people with hundreds.

We'll have to see if this gets abused. I wonder if folks will sign up as "ringers" for repos that they want to sabotage? That could be awkward. I do know that kind of spitefulness exists (I've had people do some really petty swipes at me).

Also, we may not be as useful for some repos, as for others. For example, I was the original author of a project that I turned over to a new team, a few years ago. I could answer some basic "why?" questions, but would be useless for current stuff.

Would there be some way to "score" for that? Also, maybe some folks would only be useful for subsystems of an aggregate project, that might be in a monorepo.