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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind how much people will throw their money at Kickstarter projects for the simple feeling of goodwill or novelty knick knacks (bumper stickers, buttons, etc).

$10,000 should have bought some small amount of equity, even if it was only non-voting and non-dilutable.

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The problem with Oculus kickstarter project was that you were buying a dev kit, not a final product. So now they sell the company and you have a dev kit for a facebook product... and the final usage of the Oculus may be very different than the one you thought it was going to be when you purchased the dev kit.

That cannot happen with other kickstarter projects that sell a final product like bumper stickers, buttons... In this case, the only difference with a normal purchase is that you buy the product before they manufacture it, so the startup avoids taking risks.

What's the different? If the final usage of Oculus Rift is different once they sold the company to facebook, you are still going to get different final product if you buy/pre-order it via kickstarter.

Well, this guy is a bit of a special case. IIRC he literally made more money than he knew what to do with on minecraft

~33M units shipped, at prices between $5 and $27 a pop, depending on platform and date of sale. So that'd be somewhere between $165M and $831M in revenue (with the actual figure being pretty far from either limit) off of something that originally amounted to little more than a hobby project.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine he saw that coming.

I'm curious how you feel about open source, then. Specifically, node.js. Donating hours of your time working on something that eventually got sold for lots of money that you won't see a dime of. Sounds similar.

Except if I'm a major contributor on an open source project, I A) get to shape software that I (generally speaking) am a consumer of, and B) can put that on my resume.

Donating to a Kickstarter may give you some superficial "control" over project direction, but it's a far cry from open source, and it doesn't have the future career impact.

> and it doesn't have the future career impact.

If notch cares about "future career" (see parent posts concerning how much money he's got), donating to cool gaming projects and helping them get off the ground will actually probably earn him money in the long run. Positioning yourself as a benevolent benefactor earns not only good will, but influence. Certainly the 10k wouldn't have hurt when it came time to negotiate for Minecraft for the Oculus.

Exactly my sentiment. Open source contributions mean you have some degree of control over the process.

Kickstarter contributions mean you give your money away to a business without a contractual obligation to receive anything.

Most open source licenses have some form of guarantee that the code will always remain open, so there's that.

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