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Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

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Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#41

Post by vbordo »

bradrydzewski wrote: post #28

I really like the idea, and appreciate that there are people out there trying to solve this problem! I have struggled to financially support my open source projects through donations and support contracts, and ultimately decided on an open core model, which has yielded the most success to date. Moving to an open core model is challenging and building out a sales process and sales team can be a barrier for many develo…

We really appreciate your support! Yes, we’ve discussed something exactly like what you’re describing here. Open-core is an important revenue stream for open-source projects. We’re carefully considering how we can support projects that best fit an open-core model. I’m curious to hear more about the challenges around that shift towards an open-core model.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#42

Post by chrisseaton »

jlarocco wrote: post #38
chrisseaton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have anything to back that up Have you read Berdou's PhD research on the topic? http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/study/pdf/PhD_Berdou_2007.pdf Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of open source code bases.

I had not, but it seems to back up my point. From the Overview section: "F/OS software is developed by online communities of globally distributed contributors, the majority of whom are volunteers who rarely meet face to face." And it uses KDE and GNOME as case studies, which are both very large, entrenched projects that are subsidized by companies like Red Hat and Canonical. What I'm getting at, though, is that if yo…

That's the majority of people, not the majority of the work. I said majority of the work. The PhD supports my assertion that the majority of the actual work is done paid.

I don't believe you for your 999 out of 1000 repos, but I'm not sure how we'd check that. When I browse people's GitHub profiles it's almost all little forks of things they're clearly using in their work.

I don't know what people think OSS is - it's not hobbies. The majority of our infrastructure is OSS - operating systems, compilers, browsers, virtual machines, tools, it's almost all OSS and all majority paid contributors.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#43

Post by wrestlerman »

I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I think that only a few percentages of OS projects are worth any kind of money to pay for.

Why? Because who is gonna pay for yet another react select component library that you made. Yes, it's convenient for us to use it, but it's also convenient for you that we use it, because we can also contribute and save each other's time.

I do, though, support the idea of paying maintainers of really big and crucial projects. I'd also love to see companies giving some work time to devs to contribute to OS, instead of being forced to do it in their own time.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#44

Post by tmastro »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #39

I like the ideal. Something certainly needs to be done. I've mentioned this in other HN threads, what I'd like to see is a donation system integrated into the Git platform (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, etc.). In short, I buy credits and give them to projects as I see fit. Those projects could in turn give credits, or cash out. The credits can also be used to pay feature bounties and award contribuors. Sure. Parhaps I only g…

This is an interesting idea. Making open-source more sustainable definitely requires an aggregation of resources. I think something like what you’re describing would help make it easier for maintainers to collect donations, and for more people to give them, so it would be worth exploring.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#46

Post by tmastro »

zackj117 wrote: post #45

I love the idea of it but as a company why tf would I ever go " yea ill pay for something i get for free now " when if i need their code based maintained i just pay my existing developers.

Thanks for the question! Many companies are already paying or willing to pay for open-source software, especially when a lot of their critical infrastructure in production is open-source. This is becoming a more common occurrence as open-source rises in popularity. In many cases it’s cheaper and faster for a company to pay expert maintainers rather than hire more developers or get their current developers up to speed (and keep them up to speed) on the open-source software they use.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#47

Post by jlarocco »

chrisseaton wrote: post #42
jlarocco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had not, but it seems to back up my point. From the Overview section: "F/OS software is developed by online communities of globally distributed contributors, the majority of whom are volunteers who rarely meet face to face." And it uses KDE and GNOME as case studies, which are both very large, entrenched projects that are subsidized by companies like Red Hat and Canonical. What I'm getting at, though, is that if yo…

That's the majority of people , not the majority of the work . I said majority of the work . The PhD supports my assertion that the majority of the actual work is done paid. I don't believe you for your 999 out of 1000 repos, but I'm not sure how we'd check that. When I browse people's GitHub profiles it's almost all little forks of things they're clearly using in their work. I don't know what people think OSS is - i…

> That's the majority of people, not the majority of the work. I said majority of the work. The PhD supports my assertion that the majority of the actual work is done paid.

The PhD supports that the majority of work on KDE and Gnome are done paid. Those are not typical examples, though, and I don't believe the conclusions apply to OSS in general.

Projects like those make up a tiny percentage of the OSS ecosystem, whether measuring by people or by work.

Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money

#50

Post by cosmie »

zapita wrote: post #36
cosmie wrote: post #34

It looks like DevFlight's focus is on identifying active revenue streams for maintainers, based on whatever aspects the maintainer is flexible in commercializing (priority support, feature requests, etc). That's an awesome way to help create revenue without splitting the maintainers' attention between sales and the project. A tangentially related idea I've had for helping fund OSS is offering a service that generates…

I also like that DevFlight works with individual maintainers, rather than with projects. Many prolific maintainers work with several projects. They may not have created any of those projects, and they may not run them either. When the spotlight is on the project (and by extension the founders of "top dogs" of that project), those valuable maintainers get ignored. I'm glad DevFlight is focusing on the individual.

I don't disagree that finding ways for prolific open source contributors to be able to monetize their expertise is incredibly valuable, but I'm not sure if that's actually DevFlight's focus.

Their website copy focuses on "the maintainer's" project, and DevFlight's comments on this post repeatedly reference leveraging any community channels the maintainer created (such as social media and Slack) for outreach. As well, the example list of projects they listed above has a presumption of authority/control over the project or else they don't make as much sense - you can't guarantee things like project stability or prioritize features without having some presumption of authority over the project to back it.

While DevFlight is focusing on the individual, from what I can tell it's specifically on individuals that are project maintainers, and not simply prolific contributors. From a corporate standpoint, those are two vastly different sales pitches. If the maintainer of the project commits to prioritizing feature requests or stability of the project, then they have the actual authority/capacity to follow through on that commitment. A prolific contributor might have the expertise and familiarity with the project to make those commitments, but if the maintainers have other ideas, the contributor would have no resolution other than to fork the project to maintain their commitment. Then the company is operating off of a custom fork of the project, maintained by a single person and not as battle tested as the official project, which may or may not have to deviate further away from the official project over time depending on what the contributor committed to vs. where the official project is going.

Companies hire third parties to customize, integrate, and support software all the time. And a prolific contributor to a project is a really good individual to choose for that type of work. The conversion rate for cold selling those services via outbound lead generation, without the weight of someone who can speak authoritatively on behalf of the project, will be significantly lower though.

Hopefully Victor or Tony can chime in and provide some clarification on who their target audience is. :)

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