Thank you Colin for writing this. I think it's necessary to champion how much we rely on Open Source to encourage giving back.
This has been a very recent topic at our company that was bootstrapped early this year and now is humming along nicely. We are formally implementing an Open Source Friday each month (would love to do every Fri, but company not doing quite that well). We're suggesting three avenues, but we're not limiting it to these:
1. Contributing design (we're trained designers that also develop) work to projects we actively and implicitly use.
2. Open sourcing our own novel technologies and working on documentation, issues, and community.
3. IF (there better be a good reason) we have to work on this Friday, half of the revenue for the day will be donated to supporting Open Source Software.
We'd also love to hear ideas from others on ways designers could help out the Open Source community.
"How lucky I was to be running a startup company now rather than two decades ago."
In some ways, it's harder. Two or three decades ago, there was a huge software vacuum - there were obvious niches no one had filled yet. If you could build it, they would come. Now, there's something for almost every niche, no matter how obscure. Also, the price point for software is way down. People complain about $5 now, when they used to be willing to pay $95.
Yes, today anybody can do a startup. There's even "Startups for Dummies"[1] It's easy to get the component services, from hosting to credit card processing. So everybody is doing it.
Most phone apps lose money for their creators. Small ad-supported sites are much less successful than they used to be. It's worse than starting a restaurant, the previous way to spend time and money and go broke.
Yes, there are big winners, but not very many of them.
I am not quite sure I totally agree with the authors view of 'giving back' but this is a much needed article and we need more of this. I think it's a bit risky to conflate start ups and businesses that are solving problems with 'giving back'. Let's celebrate these startups for innovating, solving problems and being successful, but let's not mix that up with 'giving back'.
Giving back would be getting involved in social causes, solving problems for free with no expectation of any return, and in this context giving back to the open source community. Stripe is awesome but in this context it would be great to hear about how they are supporting open source projects they are built on than how they are solving problems in payment processing.
Open source funding is a bit of a mess at the moment. There is a huge lacuna on how to highlight startup companies (and thus encourage others) that are successfully built on open source contribute back. Companies that use open source should at least have a page listing the projects they are using and how they are giving back. There is no visibility or any initiative that tracks and encourages this positively. Without focus and organization nothing happens. Another important thing is giving back should be simple funding for open source projects and not hiring the developers or adding developers. That seems to be more about gaining influence than supporting the project for everyone.
The more worrying thing is a general lacuna of user representation in open source in an organized fashion, developer funding of popular and interesting projects that are not a part of the startup scene and just general funding. The inevitable result is open source will if it's not already, be hijacked by corporate interests. Ultimately money makes its own agenda, and if users do not secure their interests others will.
I don't think the public good and making a profit are unable to coexist. Y Combinator has greatly aided startups, but has made a great deal of money in the process; Stripe and Amazon Web Services are very much the same.
To be sure, there are some causes which can operate as charities; but if your goal is to simplify credit card processing for startups, can it be achieved in any manner other than in the form of a corporation? My own startup falls into the same category: I wanted the world to have a solid, secure, online backup service for geeks, and it turned out that a company was the only natural way for Tarsnap to exist.
While I absolutely agree about the importance of open source software -- and that's how I've primarily given back to the community -- I don't think all the other ways people improve the world are in any way diminished by the fact that they make a profit in the process.
> Giving back would be getting involved in social causes, solving problems for free with no expectation of any return
This is impossible. Whenever we do something, we are always acting in our on interests, even if it is that warm feeling we get when we help someone. The best we can do is map our own happiness to the happiness of others.
I've given to the OpenBSD Foundation in the past. Giving $5 to a few foundations tends to help with number of donators which helps non-profit justification in some countries.
I like the FreeBSD Foundation (obviously!) and as protomyth mentions even small donations are helpful. If you're looking for "code which everybody uses but nobody thinks about", I'd suggest the Network Time Foundation.
I don't know -- I think we're all pretty lucky to have had the advances in optical technology and associated manufacturing of said technology that allowed 641A to exist.
I'm going to do nothing this year, neither for startups nor for open source software, because it's hard to draw water out of a dry well. And I feel shittier about that after reading this post.
Please don't feel bad about this. The challenge wasn't to do something; it was to think about what you can do. If the answer is "I can't do anything to help right now", that's a perfectly legitimate answer.
Yeah, but it's the same answer I would have had if you posted this last year too. That's what makes me feel shitty.
The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and nothing special, really.
> The only thing I've been able to do this year was find vulnerabilities in popular PHP projects and get them fixed. But that's par for the course and nothing special, really.
I wish I could reach through the screen, grab you by the shoulders, and shout: "THAT IS NOT PAR FOR THE COURSE! THAT IS A CONTRIBUTION! YOU HAVE DONE GOOD! FEEL GOOD FOR DOING GOOD!"
You are blinding yourself to the value of what you have done. Please, let yourself feel happy about it.
It's kind of hard to feel happy about something that:
- Takes very little time or energy
- Makes you no income
- Doesn't usually lead to friendships
- Doesn't require much intelligence, to be truthful
There's no self-actuation, no challenge, no engagement, and ultimately no reward.
It's just become routine, something I do to pass the time when not writing code for a client or when I need to unwind after a long day.
I'm aware that it's a contribution and it does matter to some people, but I'll never capture any of those $ of value anyway so it's hard to get worked up over it.
I think the most valuable thing I've done for open source in the past year was send the guy who runs dotdeb one of the items on his Amazon wish list as a thanks for making the release candidates for PHP 7 available on Debian Jessie.
In the grand scheme of things, the needle remains unmoved.
You may think this is par for the course, but I think it's a very valuable contribution. Think about the problems startups would run into if those vulnerabilities didn't get fixed but instead were exploited.
Heh. I literally search for and report vulnerabilities in my downtime to recharge between development cycles. It doesn't feel like contributing, especially since most of the problems I find can be found via grep. :/
A pull request or filing and following up on an issue with an existing project in Github is just as valuable (maybe more so) then writing something of your own/new and releasing it out there.
And with PHP, it isn't a sexy language, but a lot of the web still uses it despite the hype on more popular languages and tools.
I hope 2016 is cheerier for you. Fwiw, when I've been burnt out, what's gotten me excited again has more often tended to be finding new interesting people to work with, rather than finding interesting projects. I think both can work, but the latter can be harder when you're struggling for motivation.
Having the patience, the talent, and the willingness to go through someone else's code looking for ways to make it better /is/ doing something. You're working with people, helping to make their product all the better. That's a lot more than a lot of people do. Keep chugging, you're doing all right for yourself.
One of the advantages you have that can lead to success is your unique combination of ideas and insights that no one else has in your niche. Don't ever sell short your abilities and value, especially over the long term.
You feel shitty in your current state, but what would constitute an endstate for you that brings fulfillment and elation? I felt like you did until I decided what I wanted for my endstate. That helped guide me to make some changes. Now I don't feel shitty about my situation and I'm taking 30 mins here and there every day to eventually hit my goals.
Do what you can when you can and have the understanding that sometimes you cannot and that's ok. Sometimes the only thing you can do is put one foot in front of the other and move on down the road.
> the demands of the Occupy movement that the "1%" pay higher taxes.
Those demands are purely class warfare, though. They're ceremonial, not serious proposals to fix inequality or budget issues.
Maybe I'm wrong. Show me some serious proposals that can improve the circumstance of the poor or close the deficit based on taxing the 1%.
The broader point is well taken, though -- that we expect people with disposable time and money to use some of it to benefit mankind.
EDIT: I'm getting some downvotes, probably for the politics? (I didn't bring it up). The point is that the other examples are about the need to make a difference. The Occupy demands are substantially not. I wouldn't mind hearing contrary thoughts on this.
This has been a very recent topic at our company that was bootstrapped early this year and now is humming along nicely. We are formally implementing an Open Source Friday each month (would love to do every Fri, but company not doing quite that well). We're suggesting three avenues, but we're not limiting it to these:
1. Contributing design (we're trained designers that also develop) work to projects we actively and implicitly use.
2. Open sourcing our own novel technologies and working on documentation, issues, and community.
3. IF (there better be a good reason) we have to work on this Friday, half of the revenue for the day will be donated to supporting Open Source Software.
We'd also love to hear ideas from others on ways designers could help out the Open Source community.