Comment by andrey_utkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrey_utkin | Hacker News Reader

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> it’s extra hard when you get no additional value.

I believe this, the identification and the articulation of additional value, is the problem with FOSS sustainability, and it's urgent that we resolve that.

I hope I am onto something with the idea of crowdfunding specific commitments, as I have sketched there: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917...

The mental model behind this is quite simple, and I hope that once adopted, it will avoid a lot of unproductive behaviours and expectations on both sides, of the producers and the consumers.

It's strange that there's so little crowdfunding happening to deliver free and open source software. One of the very few prominent examples is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...

Basically I believe in offerings which promise specific qualities (timeliness of responses and bugfixes, roadmap features schedule etc) and cover the costs of development (including market rate salary for the developers according to their skills which they use to develop and manage the project).

I am currently developing this with the aim to roll out my first experimental offerings. I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions.

> I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions.

I'll take you up on this.

How far have you gotten? What surprises have you uncovered?

Are you blogging or tweeting the project?

Thanks for your interest. Do you maintain something yourself? Do you have some projects on your mind which could adopt such approach?

I am currently just beginning my research of the current state of things in Linux distributions with regard to the distribution (pun not intended) of bugticket time to resolution. I am doing this to get a fine grasp of actual state, and be able to articulate the additional value of such userbase-funded commitments.

I aspire to tracking my commitments up to full deployment in SDLC terms, but it seems this information is too hard to consistently get with the existing bugticket handling practices of Linux distros, so now I am going to start with measuring how much time it takes to mark the ticket "closed" or "resolved", whatever that means (seems to mean mostly "integration completed" in SDLC terms).

I sketch some of my thoughts here, but the notes are somewhat outdated: https://github.com/userbase-funded/wiki/wiki

I have also contacted the current maintainer of one valuable but neglected project, but got no response so far. That project is vdirsyncer, it has been not actively maintained for a year and a bit until recently, but has many consumers, and I think such projects are a good fit for my idea. https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer/issues/790

There are several projects in the low cost, user maintainable, appropriate technology space that I'm currently estimating the feasibility of starting.

I'm biased towards fascination with processes and markets, however, and value mapping and incentives are more strengths of mine than programming.

From my vantage point, there's a massive shortcoming in the mechanisms by which programmers, user programmers, and users are connecting.

Simply, I know several programmers looking for interesting physical world side projects and several craftspeople looking for automation. There's simply not a clear way to meaningfully connect them.

My ideas revolve around defined test, unit based recognition/compensation.

Person A has a specific use case, proposes it, persons B-G have similar use cases and agree on a test specification and deadline and place deposits. When the deadline is reached, the best performing commit is selected and merged, and the developer receives recognition and compensation.

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