7 ms·

As a german freelancer and long-time software dev with hundreds of releases of tens of apps/libraries, open source, under my belt, i can only say: This project

As a german freelancer and long-time software dev with hundreds of releases of tens of apps/libraries, open source, under my belt, i can only say: This project is misguided. They want only "new" stuff. You may come in with something that already exists, but even then you need to prove how you're creating a "new" feature on top of that. However funding that is pointless. People do that ALL the time. I have tons of such prototypes i have made myself, over the years and i know thousands of those among OSS dev friends. They are typically works of passion and happen regardless of any other circumstances. Meanwhile the real problem is maintenance of existing software to combat bit rot. It usually requires experienced people who need to separate time from their already full schedules, but is largely ignored. See PGP.

k__ 10y ago
It's not pointless, just different. I mean, yes people build prototypes all the time, but I think most of them don't put in 6 months full-time for a prototype.
tomchristie 10y ago
I think that's a rather negative outlook. Is the fund applicable to financing ongoing triage for projects? Nope. Is €30k worth of funding for 40 kicking off individual projects valuable and worthwhile? Hell, yes. Might the scope of an endeavor like this evolve in coming years, as they demonstrate success? Sure. Government backed funding for OSS projects is a really smart and efficient use of public money when it comes to investing in digital infrastructure. It doesn't need to be perfect on launch, and it's far easier to pitch and justify the value of seed money like this, than it is to make (just as valuable, but more subtle) wider case for ongoing funding. Furthermore I'm sure there's plenty of projects that could pitch proposals for new features that they want to build, while building in the cost of ongoing triage during those 6 months. (Ie. Make sure that the amount of work your proposing is viable on the assumption that you'll also have ongoing triage work to keep on top of at the same time.) Let's celebrate the OSS funding achievements as they come, rather than knocking them.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  > I think that's a rather negative outlook. I guess my post was partly influenced by this piece of information being rather hidden on their website, instead of up-front and center. Spending a million can be justified if they manage to drag at least one useful thing out of the pile. Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I've seen too many things fail where the tech and thinking behind it was solid and working fine, but a severe lack of round tuits strangled the project before it could blossom.
  - tomchristie 10y ago
    Sure. I think a slightly wider remit would be perfectly reasonable too. It's just that kind of funding is a little more complicated to justify, as the outcomes are less well-defined. I'm sure there'll be existing projects will be able to roll with the terms, and use the money in a way that both builds new functionality, while also refining the existing project.
  - gajomi 10y ago
    >Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I found this comment interesting, in that I imagine with the right PR campaign this could be easy to sell, and seems to me to be in line with extant German culture surrounding engineering rigor.
- VLM 10y ago
  Let me propose an alternative way of looking at it, that 30KE for six months of possible part time funding of new projects is almost perfectly wrong financially. Early in a project you want experienced people putting in lots of time (full time) on architecture and initial design and MVP. Later on, lower paid programmers can evolve the project part time to add javascript flavor of the month. As an alternative financial model, how about 25KE (or more) for two months for expert level programmers to bootstrap a new project full time only, or 60KE for a year to evolve features and squash bugs on an existing project perhaps part time. Or if politics and PR make ongoing support impossible, then only do the bootstrap phase. Its possible programmer salaries in .de are much lower than I think they are. However they can't too much lower, someone there is buying all those BMWs and VWs.
MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
Very much this. Maintaining existing software and improving user experience is what is missing in open source, building shiny new things is not. We don't need more features in Gimp or Kicad, we need them to suck less. Obligatory: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- uola 10y ago
  I don't see it. KiCad seems like a perfect example of where giving it €30k to maintain it wouldn't have mattered. It is CERNs leadership and shiny improvements, like the push and shove router, that have made people excited about KiCad again.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Actually, to have worked with KiCad (a CAD design tool for integrated circuits). The only thing that make it worthwhile is that it is free (as in $0) whereas the industry standard (Eagle) is worth a TRUCKLOAD of money (many grands per seat). That hardly gives any choice to all students, most little companies and most professionals (especially outside their work computers at big companies). People have no choice. I'd hardly call that excitement when the competitor is unaffordable to 99% of the audience. It simply cannot die because of it's monopoly (of being the cheap option).
    - uola 10y ago
      Altium is the industry standard. Eagle has a free version and is the standard for hobbyist and "makers". Thing from SparkFum or Adafruit comes with Eagle schematics for instance. Up until recently KiCad was about as exciting as gEDA. Although now even Altium has a both a free and midlevel offering.
- adrianN 10y ago
  That link redirects to a NSFW image when you go there with a HN referer.
  - 10y ago
Xylakant 10y ago
> I have tons of such prototypes i have made myself, over the years and i know thousands of those among OSS dev friends You're in an incredibly privileged position if you can afford to implement tons of prototypes. Many people have an idea but no way to allocate resources towards implementing it because they have less resources to start with, need to care for family, come from an unprivileged background, have less connections and support in the OSS community... This funding offer can act as a springboard and booster for them to join the community and further their development. Funding those is most likely a worthwhile endeavor. Funding other activities and ongoing maintenance is most likely a worthwhile endeavor as well, but calling a project misguided because it chooses a different focus is wrong and misguided.
- ptero 10y ago
  Maybe there is a definition mismatch, but I (as I suspect many/most of other folks working in tech) do throwaway prototypes all the time. For pretty much any tech project, personal or professional, I aim to use 10-30% of time to try 2-4 different approaches in a very rough form to see what works and what does not. Maybe though this is not what one would call a prototype in the context of the article (which might imply a more finished product).
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    There's a definition mismatch: The funding is intended to build a working prototype as in "this is not fully functioning and polished software, but demoable". You'd probably not build and then trash 6 month of prototype.
- nl 10y ago
  I've got 5 or 6 projects that would be at least somewhere on the road towards a viable MVP. I think a lot of programmers are have things in a similar state. Without looking at old source repos, some of the things I have laying around include: -- A website classifier: classifies websites against a fixed taxonomy. Roughly as good as AlchemyAPI -- A English-Language questions answering system. It can answer plain (written) English questions against a knowledge graph. I also have code for a non-Knowledge Based approach (from a Kaggle competition) -- A somewhat complete Docker based Minecraft server admin tool I'm sure I could find some other projects kicking around too. These are all thing I've written as a working programmer in my spare time, while supporting a family. Yes, I'm a white Anglo-Saxon male, and I'm aware that puts me in a somewhat privileged position but I'm not sure the privilege argument makes total sense here. I do this for fun, not really expecting to see a return. There are plenty of less privileged people who do similar.
vacri 10y ago
I hear what you're saying, but new features are a KPI that can be measured, especially by people who aren't experts in the software at hand. Maintenance is much more difficult to measure (and is why maintenance heroes are so often unsung).
JohnStrange 10y ago
You sound a bit too critical to me. It's a nice incentive for small developers and I can't see how this could be regarded as a waste of taxpayer money, given the small scale of it. It's similar to temporary funding for lyricists or artists, by far not enough to live by, but not bad as an additional incentive or 'token of appreciation'. In comparison to investment funding, 1.2 million for various OSS projects is nothing. So why not just create another project of passion (I agree with you on that), and get a few extra bucks from the government for it? I wish I could participate, but as a German living abroad I can't.
bshanks 10y ago
I agree. I think a similar situation obtains in academia. Economically, reusing the existing academic infrastructure to fund FOSS development would be a perfect fit, because both FOSS and research are "public goods". But the success criterion for research involves novelty. Some funding for FOSS skates by nevertheless but it's an uphill battle, due to the problems you mention (but even worse, as a production-quality implementation of something that someone else has already published a demo/prototype of is less novel than an 'original research result').

k__ 10y ago

It's not pointless, just different. I mean, yes people build prototypes all the time, but I think most of them don't put in 6 months full-time for a prototype.

tomchristie 10y ago

I think that's a rather negative outlook. Is the fund applicable to financing ongoing triage for projects? Nope. Is €30k worth of funding for 40 kicking off individual projects valuable and worthwhile? Hell, yes. Might the scope of an endeavor like this evolve in coming years, as they demonstrate success? Sure. Government backed funding for OSS projects is a really smart and efficient use of public money when it comes to investing in digital infrastructure. It doesn't need to be perfect on launch, and it's far easier to pitch and justify the value of seed money like this, than it is to make (just as valuable, but more subtle) wider case for ongoing funding. Furthermore I'm sure there's plenty of projects that could pitch proposals for new features that they want to build, while building in the cost of ongoing triage during those 6 months. (Ie. Make sure that the amount of work your proposing is viable on the assumption that you'll also have ongoing triage work to keep on top of at the same time.) Let's celebrate the OSS funding achievements as they come, rather than knocking them.

Mithaldu 10y ago
> I think that's a rather negative outlook. I guess my post was partly influenced by this piece of information being rather hidden on their website, instead of up-front and center. Spending a million can be justified if they manage to drag at least one useful thing out of the pile. Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I've seen too many things fail where the tech and thinking behind it was solid and working fine, but a severe lack of round tuits strangled the project before it could blossom.
- tomchristie 10y ago
  Sure. I think a slightly wider remit would be perfectly reasonable too. It's just that kind of funding is a little more complicated to justify, as the outcomes are less well-defined. I'm sure there'll be existing projects will be able to roll with the terms, and use the money in a way that both builds new functionality, while also refining the existing project.
- gajomi 10y ago
  >Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I found this comment interesting, in that I imagine with the right PR campaign this could be easy to sell, and seems to me to be in line with extant German culture surrounding engineering rigor.
VLM 10y ago
Let me propose an alternative way of looking at it, that 30KE for six months of possible part time funding of new projects is almost perfectly wrong financially. Early in a project you want experienced people putting in lots of time (full time) on architecture and initial design and MVP. Later on, lower paid programmers can evolve the project part time to add javascript flavor of the month. As an alternative financial model, how about 25KE (or more) for two months for expert level programmers to bootstrap a new project full time only, or 60KE for a year to evolve features and squash bugs on an existing project perhaps part time. Or if politics and PR make ongoing support impossible, then only do the bootstrap phase. Its possible programmer salaries in .de are much lower than I think they are. However they can't too much lower, someone there is buying all those BMWs and VWs.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago

Very much this. Maintaining existing software and improving user experience is what is missing in open source, building shiny new things is not. We don't need more features in Gimp or Kicad, we need them to suck less. Obligatory: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

uola 10y ago
I don't see it. KiCad seems like a perfect example of where giving it €30k to maintain it wouldn't have mattered. It is CERNs leadership and shiny improvements, like the push and shove router, that have made people excited about KiCad again.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Actually, to have worked with KiCad (a CAD design tool for integrated circuits). The only thing that make it worthwhile is that it is free (as in $0) whereas the industry standard (Eagle) is worth a TRUCKLOAD of money (many grands per seat). That hardly gives any choice to all students, most little companies and most professionals (especially outside their work computers at big companies). People have no choice. I'd hardly call that excitement when the competitor is unaffordable to 99% of the audience. It simply cannot die because of it's monopoly (of being the cheap option).
  - uola 10y ago
    Altium is the industry standard. Eagle has a free version and is the standard for hobbyist and "makers". Thing from SparkFum or Adafruit comes with Eagle schematics for instance. Up until recently KiCad was about as exciting as gEDA. Although now even Altium has a both a free and midlevel offering.
adrianN 10y ago
That link redirects to a NSFW image when you go there with a HN referer.
- 10y ago

Xylakant 10y ago

> I have tons of such prototypes i have made myself, over the years and i know thousands of those among OSS dev friends You're in an incredibly privileged position if you can afford to implement tons of prototypes. Many people have an idea but no way to allocate resources towards implementing it because they have less resources to start with, need to care for family, come from an unprivileged background, have less connections and support in the OSS community... This funding offer can act as a springboard and booster for them to join the community and further their development. Funding those is most likely a worthwhile endeavor. Funding other activities and ongoing maintenance is most likely a worthwhile endeavor as well, but calling a project misguided because it chooses a different focus is wrong and misguided.

ptero 10y ago
Maybe there is a definition mismatch, but I (as I suspect many/most of other folks working in tech) do throwaway prototypes all the time. For pretty much any tech project, personal or professional, I aim to use 10-30% of time to try 2-4 different approaches in a very rough form to see what works and what does not. Maybe though this is not what one would call a prototype in the context of the article (which might imply a more finished product).
- Xylakant 10y ago
  There's a definition mismatch: The funding is intended to build a working prototype as in "this is not fully functioning and polished software, but demoable". You'd probably not build and then trash 6 month of prototype.
nl 10y ago
I've got 5 or 6 projects that would be at least somewhere on the road towards a viable MVP. I think a lot of programmers are have things in a similar state. Without looking at old source repos, some of the things I have laying around include: -- A website classifier: classifies websites against a fixed taxonomy. Roughly as good as AlchemyAPI -- A English-Language questions answering system. It can answer plain (written) English questions against a knowledge graph. I also have code for a non-Knowledge Based approach (from a Kaggle competition) -- A somewhat complete Docker based Minecraft server admin tool I'm sure I could find some other projects kicking around too. These are all thing I've written as a working programmer in my spare time, while supporting a family. Yes, I'm a white Anglo-Saxon male, and I'm aware that puts me in a somewhat privileged position but I'm not sure the privilege argument makes total sense here. I do this for fun, not really expecting to see a return. There are plenty of less privileged people who do similar.

vacri 10y ago

I hear what you're saying, but new features are a KPI that can be measured, especially by people who aren't experts in the software at hand. Maintenance is much more difficult to measure (and is why maintenance heroes are so often unsung).

JohnStrange 10y ago

You sound a bit too critical to me. It's a nice incentive for small developers and I can't see how this could be regarded as a waste of taxpayer money, given the small scale of it. It's similar to temporary funding for lyricists or artists, by far not enough to live by, but not bad as an additional incentive or 'token of appreciation'. In comparison to investment funding, 1.2 million for various OSS projects is nothing. So why not just create another project of passion (I agree with you on that), and get a few extra bucks from the government for it? I wish I could participate, but as a German living abroad I can't.

bshanks 10y ago

I agree. I think a similar situation obtains in academia. Economically, reusing the existing academic infrastructure to fund FOSS development would be a perfect fit, because both FOSS and research are "public goods". But the success criterion for research involves novelty. Some funding for FOSS skates by nevertheless but it's an uphill battle, due to the problems you mention (but even worse, as a production-quality implementation of something that someone else has already published a demo/prototype of is less novel than an 'original research result').