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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

They don't mention the possibility of providing funding for developers anywhere in the article.

> Basically, the thinking goes that Handmade programmers have the technical chops to make amazing software, but don’t always have the aptitude or desire for the many, many other tasks that go into shipping. Payments, licensing, emails, support, design, marketing, testing, the list goes on.

Instead, it sounds like they want to take on the role of a publisher. Perhaps providing publisher-like services without any money changing hands between developer and publisher, with the latter being funded by donations and the former still having to make their own bread, just with some of the development-adjacent work offloaded.

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It’s going to be next to impossible to vet people, but I guess if they take it really slow and get to know them it could work

Unless of course “handmade” doesn’t mean what I think it does

Why do you think it would be impossible to vet people? Publishers vet the developers they work with all the time.

Edit: Upon re-reading, I actually missed this paragraph the first time.

> Membership will grant you access to a private Discord channel with other members, access to the aforementioned business resources, and possibly more benefits down the line. We have other ideas for Foundation activities, but we don’t want to distract ourselves from our primary goal as we get the Foundation off the ground.

It sounds like you get the publisher-like services in exchange for paying them. So in that sense they probably don't care if you're vetted because you're giving them money? Assuming the membership fee is sufficiently large. They are also talking a lot about "community", in-person meetings, etc. so I assume a close relationship is expected, though.

I really thought that “handmade” meant “no AI” which feels borderline impossible to verify, but now I am not sure what it even means

The "Handmade" brand goes back over 10 years, predating LLMs. The central premise is understanding the code you write at the machine level. Not that the self-professed "Handmade" coders always write in assembly, but rather, they can if they need to, and when they use high-level abstractions, they understand exactly what they're abstracting over (usually having built most of the abstractions themselves rather than pulling in 100 dependencies as is the norm nowadays).

Okay. I guess it is cool, but personally feel like the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, but you do you

No, we're still going to vet people. There's a slice of benefits we can offer to everyone who pays to become a member, but then on top of that we'll be able to provide tangible support for some number of projects as well, funded by the membership dues. Which projects we choose to support in this way will be at our discretion, and vetting the developer and the project is an obvious part of that process.

The thing we can offer developers, which is rather unique, is bespoke "Handmade-style" handling of many dull aspects of professional software: payments, licensing, email lists, websites, support, etc. The goal is to do these things without locking the project authors into a third-party platform; that is against our Handmade values and there are plenty of such products on the market today.

Yes, it does sound like an AGPL (hopefully) version of Stripe + maybe the software stores like F-Droid. At least that's what I'd want this to be.

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