Show HN: I founded a company and a platform to fund open source developers
equalize.digital
equalize.digital
At first glance, your product feels unrelated to this. It seems like a Stack Overflow replacement that's worse for posterity (read: googlers) because chats are private. It also feels like a side-gig for open source developers, asking them to basically freelance to fund their open source projects, which I don't think is how that should work.
I think you'd have more luck as a platform for paid support licenses for open source software. Bootstrapping a support license program is a Big Deal for independent open source developers who don't want more administrative work. But this feels like a miss on that front. Happy to confer more.
> Minus server costs and wages, all of the money processed through Immutable Coffee will go directly back to the developers and experts answering questions for the community.
You might want to look into forming a nonprofit, as this is almost exactly what it is (minus ownership stakes). If you're a nonprofit people don't have to trust sentences like this, as it's baked into your existence.
As far as Immutable Coffee being a Stack Overflow replacement, I don't think that's accurate. Stack Overflow is already saturated enough that I don't think that there's any need for another website to exist for posterity's sake. Being able to google questions and answers doesn't feel like a very important goal, especially considering how quickly answers get invalidated with how fast programming moves anyway.
As far as it being a side-gig for open source developers, I think that's an accurate assessment -- unfortunately. I did try very hard to do something that sets this site apart from traditional freelancing, and that's in the quick pace which a developer can answer questions. It doesn't take much time at all to log onto IC and really quickly claim a few questions and start helping people, in contrast with how long it takes to set up traditional freelance gigs.
Thanks for believing in the mission! I have a few other ideas that are in the works with regards to this as well, that I'm just as excited to show HN.
It’s been traditionally difficult for open source software organizations to get recognized as a 503c nonprofit (which allows people to make tax deductible donations). Things may have changed, but the IRS has struggled to decide if FOSS is truly volunteer work or is more of a tax shelter. A nonprofit can also be more overhead in terms of structure (you need a board), record keeping & accounting than an LLC (but not much more than a C-Corp).
Unless you’re operating model depends on donations, it might be worth staying an LLC for a while.
Check with a lawyer, accountant, or Stripe Atlas for real guidance. It’s been a while since I looked at firming a company.
I wonder if immutable.coffee could allow the asker (or by default) publish the answer transcript as an immutable record. Then the public can upvote it, which becomes a rating system for answers and the experts who gave the answers.
The idea above might tend to only reward the experts who got there first, so that's something to think about.
I want to allow the answers and experts to be rated because eventually someone will try to exploit the honesty of the system and say "yeah just download this .exe and it will fix your problem.."
Btw, there are a number of big companies that do the "talk to an expert" thing, such as GLG. Might be worth checking them out. Good luck!
Literally thousands of developers at Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, working full time, fully paid on upstream projects, would slightly disagree.
I’m not saying that every F/OSS developer makes a lot of money, but I oppose the notion that it is “near impossible” to do so.
[disclaimer: I work at Red Hat since 14 years as EMEA Evangelist]
Why not just work as a regular programmer regardless of what i work on is FOSS instead and keep my own projects under my control for myself?
They may get to choose what features they let you work on during your paid hours, but it's still within the subset of features that are desired / allowed by the maintainers.
So, you still have control, you just get to spend more time working on it. If they want to take it in another direction that you don't want then either they can pay someone else to do it _or_ you can choose to fork your own project and have a version with the behaviors they want and maintain the original version with the behaviors you want.
If you've picked a company that's well aligned with the project then them paying you to work on the thing is generally the same as you working on what you want to work on, with maybe some features more highly prioritized that would otherwise be.
if the project is under a Free Software license, who cares who actually owns the copyright? you can still use the code. sure, ownership does make some difference, but that's a tradeoff i am willing to make.
also, if you start the project on your own and get hired by a company later, they will only own the portion of the code that you wrote after you joined them. you still own everything you created before that point, so if they want to do anything with the code that violates the license, they still have to ask your permission, and if you don't agree, you can still jump ship at that point, and you are no worse off than before taking the job.
It is near impossible to make money off of oss as an indie. Working for someone else that makes billions off it and pays you near nothing, doesnt count.
I think the real way to equalize OSS software is to make it partially OSS ... maybe any company w/ < 10 mill profits it's FOSS, any company over that has to pay in man-hours (contributions) or $$ to use the product.
Amazon/FB/Microsoft and other Faang's could easily reproduce any oss software to meet their needs using their own staff...
Maybe even just have a github like site to host software and each organization pays based on their value, w/ startups/small companies under 10 million annual revenues essentially having free access.
Larger companies would pay a per employee fee, that fee would be divided up among all FOSS software that company uses. They could get some refunds for any contributions accepted to FOSS. It'd basically be like patreon for software in a semi-walled garden.
Small members could also 'opt-in' to pay $x per month that would also be divided up among other OSS projects. Either random, or they could pick by grouped projects or just pick their favorites to receive a % of their monthly donation.
I guess that in functionality the sites are similar, but hopefully the overarching goals of the project will bring them in different directions.
A friendly reminder that it is Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer. Doing what you suggest is a good approach for Free Beer, not Freedom.
Qt has the perfect business model for OSS. Respect the LGPL license for Qt and get it for free without any extra restrictions. Or go straight for a commercial license. Plus they sell add-ons and other software and support around Qt.
And considering all the places where Qt is used, I would say they are very successful at it.
This incentivizes making software that requires consultancy (or at best, disincentivizes fixing issues with the software that would lessen the income from consultancy).
Your profit should come from the software being the best it can be (not to be confused with having the most bloated feature checklist) by itself, not by anything surrounding it.
Except for that part where their business model incentivizes them to bloat the library towards what is actually paying (car and smart fridge dashboard UIs) instead of what most people would want Qt to focus on (desktop widgets - see pretty much every thread whenever a Qt release or news is posted).
> And considering all the places where Qt is used, I would say they are very successful at it.
Since we're talking in the context of money instead of popularity, 1000000 projects using the LGPL version of Qt for free doesn't make Qt successful, it only makes it popular.
That will happen to any project that takes any form of sponsorship money. People sponsoring will always want to prioritize their needs.
> instead of what most people would want Qt to focus on (desktop widgets - see pretty much every thread whenever a Qt release or news is posted).
KDE, with it's very successful suite of OSS, cross platform apps, Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile would like to disagree. You should remember that Qt is the only cross platform toolkit for desktops that is small, performant and actually works without compromises.
> Since we're talking in the context of money instead of popularity, 1000000 projects using the LGPL version of Qt for free doesn't make Qt successful, it only makes it popular.
Those 1000000 projects include Krita and Kdenlive, the successful and premiere apps in their categories that even give proprietary tools a run for their subscription money while being completely free and cross platform. KDE Plasma is the only fully featured independent DE that runs across Linux and BSD's.
Qt and it's business model is a success by all terms.
Right, this is exactly what i wrote.
> KDE, with it's very successful suite of OSS, cross platform apps, Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile would like to disagree.
Disagree on what? They wouldn't like Qt developers to focus on desktop widgets?
Besides, KDE and its suite is only a small fraction of what Qt is used for. It acts as a nice cheerleader but Qt is used by a LOT more than just KDE.
> You should remember that Qt is the only cross platform toolkit for desktops that is small, performant and actually works without compromises.
That sounds like marketing buzzwords.
> Those 1000000 projects include Krita and Kdenlive, the successful and premiere apps in their categories that even give proprietary tools a run for their subscription money while being completely free and cross platform. KDE Plasma is the only fully featured independent DE that runs across Linux and BSD's.
How much of that money goes to Qt's developers? I mean, how do you go from what you wrote here to:
> Qt and it's business model is a success by all terms.
And last time i checked, the money Krita (i don't know about Kdenlive) gets is a pittance.
I think the patreon-like idea is great! Similarly to how netflix turned lots of people that previously watched movies for gratis on streaming sites into paying customers, making paying money for software easy and convenient should have a large impact.
The big question are who should handle the financials of this and how the money is then divided.
It might be worth offering two pricing options: (1) Pay for private answers, (2) free/bounty open source answers.
Your concept seems to have some overlap with StackOverflow. A problem with StackOverflow is their content is licensed CC-BY-SA. That can make some answers dicey for companies to use. Publicly visible answers on your site might be more valuable than StackOverflow answers if you released them as CC0. CC0 answers could also be merged into the docs of the FOSS projects. Having those answers on your site should drive more search traffic to you, bringing more leads for paid private Q&A.
On the expert side of what you’re doing... if you can streamline the payment process & generate a 1099 for taxes (like Lyft-style companies do) that might remove some overhead for experts & get them interested.
Side note... It’s not often we see HN front page stories from Tucson, AZ & that’s awesome!
* Private (answers don't circulate around the internet! that's important because of how quickly answers on stack overflow become invalidated)
and * Immediate & one-on-one (waiting for answers/responses in a comment chain on Stack Overflow is a super frustrating experience!)
And thank you! Lots of love for Tuscon. Bear down!
Relying on donations seems like a bad move, business-wise, because I'd guess (no data to back this up, just gut feeling) that most donations will come from individuals and not busineses, yet the businesses are the ones making money off of your code.
Then Instant Coffee is covering a chunk of the payment & client acquisition overhead you’d otherwise need to duplicate.
Take a look at Lyft’s post-ride survey. Rate your ride, plus a set of chips that let people express what stood out about the driver, plus a comment field. Very simple & quick to complete.
Otherwise your platform is really a way for random people to get money (nothing wrong with that) while the actual maintainers are busy writing code, reviewing tickets, etc.
I know monetizing open source is terribly difficult so I don't want to sound too negative.
Ideally, this is the plan.