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"Just open-source it" is not realistic

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#61

Post by svaksha »

tillk wrote: post #39
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering too so I found the kickstarter. It's some kind of personal feed reader server: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...

Thanks! I am surprised by this trend — put a project on kickstarter and promise to open source it. Build it on tech that's been open sourced for free. Trying to stay positive here. But haven't they heard of the millions of people who contribute to (quality) open source software every day?

... and dont forget the few thousand FOSS projects already freely available on Gitorious, Github, Bitbucket, Google-Code, Launchpad, Sourceforge and ... so many more !

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#62

Post by svaksha »

StavrosK wrote: post #27
aggronn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and if no one is compelled to buy it to begin with? that's what I'm asking. I don't think we can just assume that someone would buy it.

Sure, we can't, but if you open source it, you'll make strictly less money than if you hadn't (because if nobody was going to buy it, they aren't going to pay you money if you open source it anyway). This is too simplified, as you can have other monetization models, but usually you don't open-source things if you want to charge for them.

Not entirely true. You can monetize around the open source software you built but this largely depends on what you built. In this case, she is expecting to raise 30k for a feed reader, when there are already open sourced readers with a similar functionality(?).

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#63

Post by pnathan »

daleharvey wrote: post #42
pnathan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, a tarball of shit is better than NOTHING. bzzzt! Wrong! Releasing stuff that is "close enough" as a product and have it succeed is wasting other people's lives as they struggle to fix your ball of mud and make it work better over time. Better to wait and not waste other people's time.

Just in case anyone who is thinking about releasing open source softare reads this, it is entirely wrong. Software (open or otherwise) is never done, its always too ugly, missing some features, slow and / or buggy. If you are thinking about releasing your stuff as open source, do it now, it probably is too early and nobody will use it, someone may pick up it or your next library, share some knowledge report some bugs…

Baloney! Releasing dysfunctional crap is giving your users crap that they have to do the grunt work to maintain.

It's entirely one thing to release functional and ugly code, it's entirely another to simply code dump broken crap and think that's a good thing.

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#64

Post by daleharvey »

pnathan wrote: post #63
daleharvey wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in case anyone who is thinking about releasing open source softare reads this, it is entirely wrong. Software (open or otherwise) is never done, its always too ugly, missing some features, slow and / or buggy. If you are thinking about releasing your stuff as open source, do it now, it probably is too early and nobody will use it, someone may pick up it or your next library, share some knowledge report some bugs…

Baloney! Releasing dysfunctional crap is giving your users crap that they have to do the grunt work to maintain. It's entirely one thing to release functional and ugly code, it's entirely another to simply code dump broken crap and think that's a good thing.

People spending all their time fixing broken libraries that they would have been quicker writing themselves is a problem that pretty much never happens, there are multiple ways in which to determine if a library is likely stable or mature enough to be used, and testing whether it works or not is usually a fraction of the time that it would take to write the thing from scratch.

If you open source some code without making any grandiose promises and someone somehow ends up in the position where they are wasting their time fixing it, its entirely their own decision / fault.

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#65

Post by dnautics »

casiotone wrote: post #59
dnautics wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are free to leave your boss. Your country is liable to extort money from you at the end of a gunbarrel if you try to leave it.

This may come as a shock to you, but the majority of Americans depend on their employment to obtain little things like food, roofs over heads, medicine, heating, etc. It is not so simple to 'leave your boss' unless you consider dying of starvation to be a good choice. And where do you go after you leave your boss? Oh... another boss.

so you don't think there's a categorical difference here? This may come as a shock to you, but being unemployed is not exactly the end of the world. If you're a good person, there are usually people who will step up to help you out in a time of need, and even if you aren't there are social services.

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#66

Post by pdonis »

dnautics wrote: post #65
casiotone wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may come as a shock to you, but the majority of Americans depend on their employment to obtain little things like food, roofs over heads, medicine, heating, etc. It is not so simple to 'leave your boss' unless you consider dying of starvation to be a good choice. And where do you go after you leave your boss? Oh... another boss.

so you don't think there's a categorical difference here? This may come as a shock to you, but being unemployed is not exactly the end of the world. If you're a good person, there are usually people who will step up to help you out in a time of need, and even if you aren't there are social services.

even if you aren't there are social services

Where do you think those social services come from?

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#67

Post by mempko »

mwfunk wrote: post #40
mempko wrote: post #23

In other words, capitalism ruins it for the rest of us....

What's the alternative? Do you want your tax money to go towards supporting this particular developer so that she can open source this particular project? Because that's the alternative. Or are you saying that she shouldn't have the right to determine what to do with her code? Because that world sounds pretty awful too.

" Do you want your tax money to go towards supporting this particular developer so that she can open source this particular project?"

How exactly do you think the Internet, most of computer hardware and software was researched and developed before the GREAT PRIVATIZATION in the late 1970s.

Re: "Just open-source it" is not realistic

#68

Post by nhangen »

sillysaurus wrote: post #43
nhangen wrote: post #13

If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck ( http://ignitiondeck.com ) to raise money over a longer duration. 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…

Well, I'm happy you self-promoted. Ignition Deck looks really awesome, and I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise. For example, http://ignitiondeck.com/id/crowdfunding-a-video-game/ is the most valuable crowdfunding breakdown I've ever seen.

Thanks a lot. My partner Shawn worked very hard on that one, and we put a lot of time/effort into it. Glad you found it useful.
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