Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

However, what we're trying to build is more like an open-source product, essentially an entire service made public so anyone can use it.

I think the part of this that got me pondering is that typically a basic prototype or initial version would be open sourced, people would play with it, and then funding or sponsorship would come along. Projects like Redis, WordPress, TravisCI, jQuery, Node.js, Ruby, Phusion Passenger, and PHP come to mind.

Your approach is different in asking for money up front and then promising to open source only when the project is finished.

While it seems you are awesome guys, much loved, and do good work, it's that leap from the previously established model that gets me wondering if it's a good approach. Maybe it is and I just don't realize it yet. Maybe I'm being nostalgic. But if this project were already open sourced and you were asking for funding to make a serious go of it, it would, to me, seem an easier sell than "we want to build X, give us the $ we need, and we'll open source it when we're done."

I suspect I'm just being a bit of an old fogey, but without questions come no answers.. ;-)

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I see it more as crowd-funding (I feel dirty using that term) a useful service with the added benefit of being able to run it yourself. The goal was to spur more/better discussions (than what private chat or crappy forums currently do).

We could certainly open up the code sooner, it just won't be polished enough to use from the get-go.

Most of all, it's an experiment for us. Do other people want this service as much as we do? Is this a valid way to try to bootstrap something? Can a service 100% (K, so 95%) open-source itself & still make ends meet?

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I see it more as crowd-funding (I feel dirty using that term) a useful service with the added benefit of being able to run it yourself.

That's a better way for me to interpret it actually. I latched on to the "open source" aspect as being of utmost significance, but really it seems you are taking the well trod route of getting funding for your product - much like anyone who applies to YC or seeks investors - and the open source part is a nice big cherry on the top when you're done. Given that, your approach makes a lot more sense vs my initial "we wanna do an open source project, give us $ to start!" interpretation ;-)

Well, good luck! You have certainly picked an area of software that is crying out for better solutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com