11–20 of 68 posts
so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?
Can anyone explain/summarize what this is? I gather it was/is feed reader, but I can't find much more and she (?) is very vague. Or I don't know how to navigate her blog.
We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive.
Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this case, I'm trying to help.
"I might make myself look a bit messy by releasing this. I also imagine that some other people might have to put in some amount of work (much less than the work I put into writing this in the first place) to get this to work, so I'll make them rewrite it all from scratch if they are in need of this functionality." I don't believe this person understands empathy. I realize if you want your project to flourish as an op…
I don't think any of this negates your argument, but I understand the apprehension involved in open sourcing a project one feels is sub-par.
I can't just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k "after" open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open-source and profit aren't mutually exclusive, in this case he was unable to get enough of the latter to justify the effort of the former, perfectly reasonable.
You're both right, that's what the blog seems to be saying to me. Can't argue with either. I think this is also a not-so-hidden hint of 'if you wanted this open source, you should have paid more attention to that kickstarter!' I can't really blame people for not backing that kickstarter either though. Why $30K for an OSS feed reader when there are so many open source ones [1] that could be easily retooled to most pur…
www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader-extraordinaire
There's a vague description of being an RSS reader that you have control over. There's all kinds of talk of the various technologies that Fred sits on top of, but very little talk about what Fred itself actually does. There's a single image on the Kickstarter page, which isn't the product itself, and looks like something whipped together in Paint in 5 minutes time. There's a link to a demo site, but, again, it's not entirely clear what's going on when you get there.
It's not that people are unwilling to pitch in or that $30k is necessarily even too much for that, but it has to be something people want and you have to give them a reason to want it. The lack of any kind of compelling pitch seems to be what killed the Kickstarter in this case.
"I might make myself look a bit messy by releasing this. I also imagine that some other people might have to put in some amount of work (much less than the work I put into writing this in the first place) to get this to work, so I'll make them rewrite it all from scratch if they are in need of this functionality." I don't believe this person understands empathy. I realize if you want your project to flourish as an op…
Not necessarily. A tarball of shit can become the de facto standard for some utility, and end up haunting us for ages after it gains critical mass, even long after a superior replacement arrives. See, e.g., rvm.
I can't just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k "after" open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.
It sounds like she wants to release software that works well without needing any maintenance, which would tend toward a payment up-front model.