5 ms·

I'm a little worried that this only studies channels and not the original content itself. I've personally used most of these channels and have found a rather "b

I'm a little worried that this only studies channels and not the original content itself. I've personally used most of these channels and have found a rather "bucket-of-crabs" sort of reaction, unless I'm very, very careful to release an absolutely perfect post. There generally seems to be only a level of tolerance for projects released by big companies. If you have a FANG coolant behind your name, it doesn't matter what you're releasing, how long you've been working on it, or even how big your team actually is, you'll grab a ton of popularity. But as a solo dev releasing under my own name, the only things I can get attention for are basically hacks in niche topics. The long-standing, well designed work I do, that is used in real projects, with tons of documentation and proven results, at best gets ignored. At worst, I get accused of "re-inventing the wheel", even for things I invented. I've never gotten anyone to join me on a project. There are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies that "solo-dev work won't be around in a year, so don't bother even starting". Either I release too early and people don't want to join because nothing is finished, or I put a ton of effort into documentation and contribution guidelines and then things just get ignored. Just when is it a good time to go from code I've written on my own to sharing with others? It just really makes it seem like FOSS is only for people who have a big, recognised company backing them. I've even had a project or two copied by recognized companies, with no larger team than one or two people, and watched their half-baked early releases quickly eclipse my own efforts just because they could get people to join the effort and work for free.

bai0 7y ago
This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well... We are all alone together.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  I wonder if Linus Torvalds--without the name recognition--would be able to release Linux today? His first posts about it were met with some complaints about "GNU Herd will be here any day", but despite being super primitive, he somehow still got enough people on board to become a self-sustaining project. Hell, I wonder if anyone other than Google, Apple, or Microsoft could successfully release a brand new operating system today. Everything seems to be about consolidation to a single norm of "like Linux". Where did the diversity of tech go?
  - z3t4 7y ago
    I remember in the 90's you could publish anything and people would try it out because boredom I guess. Now there is so much to choose from. But I think its still possible if you find a good channel. Literally an IRC channel or niche forum where you will find your first users. Before starting a project, ask yourself who will be the first users and where do I find them.
    - moron4hire 7y ago
      My first user is always myself. I write code to make my work easier. It grows over time and then I start thinking others might also find it helps them with similar work.
      - z3t4 7y ago
        Also allow yourself a budget and to search for an existing solution. If you are gonna spend 100 hours on something, a couple of thousand dollars is not that much if you can just buy an already existing solution. For example, I wanted a feature in my text/code editor, and the only product that had that feature cost 1000/month, I thought that was too much so I spent several hundred hours creating my own editor ... And of course no one is interested in my editor besides myself. That's a lot of opportunity cost, time that I could have spent doing something else.
        rabidrat 7y ago
        Of course the fear is that you spend a few thousand dollars on a potential solution, use it for a few months only to discover that it does only about 60% of what you really need and/or it's painful/difficult to use. So now you're either stuck with a substandard solution, or you are going to do the work yourself anyway, and are out the few thousand dollars besides.
        atq2119 7y ago
        It's ironic that so many people here are complaining about their solo projects not gaining traction, but nobody seems to want to pitch into somebody else's project and make it their own. Please don't take it personally, I simply noted a pattern and the fact that I'm writing this on your comment in particular is just random chance. In your example, why would you start yet another editor? There are hundreds, possibly thousands, already out there. Instead of writing your own, you could have taken the one that's popular and closest to what you want, and started to change it to fit your needs (or written a plugin, if the editor allowed for it). One of my own favourite experiences with open source development was when I basically revived an existing project by starting to make contributions to it, which then pulled the original creator back in and ultimately others as well.
- bai0 7y ago
  Just checked your profile, didn't realize you were the author of PrimroseVR. Now I feel even more alone-together with you, I'm the sole developer for JanusWeb and my experience completely matches what you describe. Pretty depressing how open source projects by individuals can at best hope to "inspire" devs at FAANG companies to just do the same thing and then use their company's immense resources and developer relation teams to promote their project over the ones that existed before them. I wonder how many talented devs have had this happen to them only to give up and stop trying.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    LOL, thanks. I tend to think the only reason Primrose had any attention was because it was the only complete framework for WebVR in the browser at the time. I remember using JanusVR in 2014 at a VR meetup on someone's DK2 and really liking it. But all I had at home was a smartphone in a cardboard box that I had hacked together myself shortly after seeing the Google Cardboard announcement. I only got a DK2 after Tojiro started releasing his WebVR builds of Chromium, then got lucky that my design was similar enough to his early WebVR API design that the port only took a day. Primrose existed for a year before A-Frame came out. And overnight, I somehow became the copycat. In the second year, I even saw claims I was copying ReactVR. Incidentally, way early on, I had been planning to extend Primrose to run in JanusVR. But after the third year, I just couldn't get past the burnout and was getting professional dev work only for Unity. So here I am now, I'm the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company, where I'm working exclusively in Unity. I have a new framework I call Juniper, but I haven't really told anyone about it because I just don't care anymore. It's good enough that it's just for me. It's open on Github, and if someone stumbles on it, that's ok, but otherwise I'd rather focus on working for money than working for criticism on HN.
    - bai0 7y ago
      Yup, very similar story here. I'd been working on a WebGL engine called Elation Engine since 2011, and when VR hit the scene, I quickly added support for barrel shader and WebSocket tracking, then when WebVR was a thing added support for that as well. Those times were exciting, it felt like indies and hackers were driving the technology, and the possibilities were endless. I joined Janus in 2016, after Facebook bought my previous employer and fired my team. I'd added support for loading Janus worlds within my engine, which opened it up to normal web browsers, and the team at Janus was excited for the possibilities. It was a great story of how I was able to turn an open source project into a paying job, and people were EXCITED about what we were building! We had investors and users, everything was great! Fast forward to today. The team is broken and burnt out. Many left when we couldn't secure another round of funding and the paychecks dried up. The code is in a poor state because we kept chasing what platform gatekeepers and potential investors told us THEY wanted to see. The founder and myself both had kids within a month of each other and can no longer work like we used to. One guy's wife left him because he was spending so much time travelling and promoting the project. We have less users than ever, despite our tech being years ahead of what people think is possible. We still pretend like we're a normal healthy happy company, because we still believe in the idea and nobody's going to invest in a company of depressed burnt out people. But now even that fantasy is unsustainable, it's probably time to just give up and get a regular old job. Of course success was never guaranteed, but what we didn't expect was how we'd just end up shunned and ignored. When A-Frame first launched, they listed Janus as an inspiration, but once they reached some level of success and saw us as competitors, they wrote us out of that history book - literally just removed us from the list of inspirations, but kept other projects like SceneVR (whose author also credits Janus as his inspiration). We've got literally thousands of interconnected worlds people have built which nobody visits or links to, but if someone makes a similar world with A-Frame or Babylon, we're sure to hear all about how great and new and innovative it is. Modern open source is not the same scene it used to be. I don't know what's next. It's pretty depressing.
z3t4 7y ago
Its crazy how much Microsoft et.al spend on marketing their open source projects. Have anyone had any luck selling their OSS to a big company in order to keep working on it?
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  The author of GNOME Builder did a kickstarter to fund development and later RedHat hired him into a role where he primarily continues working on it. It happens, but it's not exactly common.
gus_massa 7y ago
Redis is a good counterexample, so there is hope for solo / small team developers.
- jdsully 7y ago
  Redis gets contributions from Redis Labs and Amazon. Although it tends to take a very long time for PRs to get merged. Its one of the reasons behind my fork KeyDB which coincidentally got its initial traction from a HN post [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368955
  - gus_massa 7y ago
    IIRC it started as a guy eating pizza in front of the sea. Later, when it got traction, he made his own company around the project and got external support of big companies. I guess the long times to merge are because it is a very opinionated project. (But I'm not using it or following the details.) If you agree with his opinion you will be happy. If you disagree you will be unhappy. The nice part of open source is that if you disagree, you can fork the project.
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    I love the redis service, and the people, but you're not wrong about the slow PR process. I went through the source to start correct spelling mistakes, and submitted my first pull request back in April. Where it has languished ever since. Some open pull requests date back 5+ years, with zero comments. I'd love to help close/comment on them, but it seems that there is little interest in such cleanup.
    - jdsully 7y ago
      If you ever have the time I’d appreciate any help you van give with KeyDB. It’s an attempt to accelerate progress in the Redis universe. https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB
      - 7y ago
vemv 7y ago
I find the bucket-of-crabs observation super interesting. It's likely a problem not often talked about (nobody likes to admit or suggest envy). At the same time, there is some justification when developers get put off by certain OSS projects. I think 90% of OSS projects shouldn't exist at all, just like 90% of music releases (think dozens of millions of songs!) shouldn't exist at all. "I made a thing" != "this thing should be shared/promoted". Projects so often lack rationale, research and rigour. Of course, solving your own problem for yourself is always fine, but sharing it with the world should imply some caution.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  I think the problem is that there is much more emphasis on the technology stack and trendy patterns than there is on the actual product. When I build software, I build it for a purpose and it is designed for maintainability. I'm not doing it just to play around with a new toy. But it seems most of the attention goes towards toys. I swear, most of the ML projects I see right now are basically, "I totally figured out how to setup TensorFlow and stumbled on a large set of pre-existing training data." The resulting project looks unusable as a product or component of a product. And given the difficulty in setting up the environment and finding training sets, I have some doubts as to replicability or even likelihood anyone will try to replicate it. It almost feels like you could create completely fake results and nobody would question it. Not meant to be a shot at the ML field, but more at the technology "community" that consumes this stuff. It's like magazine articles vs books. Everyone reading articles about books, literary critique, discussing authors and genres. Few people actually reading books. Fewer still writing them.

bai0 7y ago

This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well... We are all alone together.

moron4hire 7y ago
I wonder if Linus Torvalds--without the name recognition--would be able to release Linux today? His first posts about it were met with some complaints about "GNU Herd will be here any day", but despite being super primitive, he somehow still got enough people on board to become a self-sustaining project. Hell, I wonder if anyone other than Google, Apple, or Microsoft could successfully release a brand new operating system today. Everything seems to be about consolidation to a single norm of "like Linux". Where did the diversity of tech go?
- z3t4 7y ago
  I remember in the 90's you could publish anything and people would try it out because boredom I guess. Now there is so much to choose from. But I think its still possible if you find a good channel. Literally an IRC channel or niche forum where you will find your first users. Before starting a project, ask yourself who will be the first users and where do I find them.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    My first user is always myself. I write code to make my work easier. It grows over time and then I start thinking others might also find it helps them with similar work.
    - z3t4 7y ago
      Also allow yourself a budget and to search for an existing solution. If you are gonna spend 100 hours on something, a couple of thousand dollars is not that much if you can just buy an already existing solution. For example, I wanted a feature in my text/code editor, and the only product that had that feature cost 1000/month, I thought that was too much so I spent several hundred hours creating my own editor ... And of course no one is interested in my editor besides myself. That's a lot of opportunity cost, time that I could have spent doing something else.
      - rabidrat 7y ago
        Of course the fear is that you spend a few thousand dollars on a potential solution, use it for a few months only to discover that it does only about 60% of what you really need and/or it's painful/difficult to use. So now you're either stuck with a substandard solution, or you are going to do the work yourself anyway, and are out the few thousand dollars besides.
      - atq2119 7y ago
        It's ironic that so many people here are complaining about their solo projects not gaining traction, but nobody seems to want to pitch into somebody else's project and make it their own. Please don't take it personally, I simply noted a pattern and the fact that I'm writing this on your comment in particular is just random chance. In your example, why would you start yet another editor? There are hundreds, possibly thousands, already out there. Instead of writing your own, you could have taken the one that's popular and closest to what you want, and started to change it to fit your needs (or written a plugin, if the editor allowed for it). One of my own favourite experiences with open source development was when I basically revived an existing project by starting to make contributions to it, which then pulled the original creator back in and ultimately others as well.
bai0 7y ago
Just checked your profile, didn't realize you were the author of PrimroseVR. Now I feel even more alone-together with you, I'm the sole developer for JanusWeb and my experience completely matches what you describe. Pretty depressing how open source projects by individuals can at best hope to "inspire" devs at FAANG companies to just do the same thing and then use their company's immense resources and developer relation teams to promote their project over the ones that existed before them. I wonder how many talented devs have had this happen to them only to give up and stop trying.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  LOL, thanks. I tend to think the only reason Primrose had any attention was because it was the only complete framework for WebVR in the browser at the time. I remember using JanusVR in 2014 at a VR meetup on someone's DK2 and really liking it. But all I had at home was a smartphone in a cardboard box that I had hacked together myself shortly after seeing the Google Cardboard announcement. I only got a DK2 after Tojiro started releasing his WebVR builds of Chromium, then got lucky that my design was similar enough to his early WebVR API design that the port only took a day. Primrose existed for a year before A-Frame came out. And overnight, I somehow became the copycat. In the second year, I even saw claims I was copying ReactVR. Incidentally, way early on, I had been planning to extend Primrose to run in JanusVR. But after the third year, I just couldn't get past the burnout and was getting professional dev work only for Unity. So here I am now, I'm the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company, where I'm working exclusively in Unity. I have a new framework I call Juniper, but I haven't really told anyone about it because I just don't care anymore. It's good enough that it's just for me. It's open on Github, and if someone stumbles on it, that's ok, but otherwise I'd rather focus on working for money than working for criticism on HN.
  - bai0 7y ago
    Yup, very similar story here. I'd been working on a WebGL engine called Elation Engine since 2011, and when VR hit the scene, I quickly added support for barrel shader and WebSocket tracking, then when WebVR was a thing added support for that as well. Those times were exciting, it felt like indies and hackers were driving the technology, and the possibilities were endless. I joined Janus in 2016, after Facebook bought my previous employer and fired my team. I'd added support for loading Janus worlds within my engine, which opened it up to normal web browsers, and the team at Janus was excited for the possibilities. It was a great story of how I was able to turn an open source project into a paying job, and people were EXCITED about what we were building! We had investors and users, everything was great! Fast forward to today. The team is broken and burnt out. Many left when we couldn't secure another round of funding and the paychecks dried up. The code is in a poor state because we kept chasing what platform gatekeepers and potential investors told us THEY wanted to see. The founder and myself both had kids within a month of each other and can no longer work like we used to. One guy's wife left him because he was spending so much time travelling and promoting the project. We have less users than ever, despite our tech being years ahead of what people think is possible. We still pretend like we're a normal healthy happy company, because we still believe in the idea and nobody's going to invest in a company of depressed burnt out people. But now even that fantasy is unsustainable, it's probably time to just give up and get a regular old job. Of course success was never guaranteed, but what we didn't expect was how we'd just end up shunned and ignored. When A-Frame first launched, they listed Janus as an inspiration, but once they reached some level of success and saw us as competitors, they wrote us out of that history book - literally just removed us from the list of inspirations, but kept other projects like SceneVR (whose author also credits Janus as his inspiration). We've got literally thousands of interconnected worlds people have built which nobody visits or links to, but if someone makes a similar world with A-Frame or Babylon, we're sure to hear all about how great and new and innovative it is. Modern open source is not the same scene it used to be. I don't know what's next. It's pretty depressing.

z3t4 7y ago

Its crazy how much Microsoft et.al spend on marketing their open source projects. Have anyone had any luck selling their OSS to a big company in order to keep working on it?

newnewpdro 7y ago
The author of GNOME Builder did a kickstarter to fund development and later RedHat hired him into a role where he primarily continues working on it. It happens, but it's not exactly common.

gus_massa 7y ago

Redis is a good counterexample, so there is hope for solo / small team developers.

jdsully 7y ago
Redis gets contributions from Redis Labs and Amazon. Although it tends to take a very long time for PRs to get merged. Its one of the reasons behind my fork KeyDB which coincidentally got its initial traction from a HN post [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368955
- gus_massa 7y ago
  IIRC it started as a guy eating pizza in front of the sea. Later, when it got traction, he made his own company around the project and got external support of big companies. I guess the long times to merge are because it is a very opinionated project. (But I'm not using it or following the details.) If you agree with his opinion you will be happy. If you disagree you will be unhappy. The nice part of open source is that if you disagree, you can fork the project.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  I love the redis service, and the people, but you're not wrong about the slow PR process. I went through the source to start correct spelling mistakes, and submitted my first pull request back in April. Where it has languished ever since. Some open pull requests date back 5+ years, with zero comments. I'd love to help close/comment on them, but it seems that there is little interest in such cleanup.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    If you ever have the time I’d appreciate any help you van give with KeyDB. It’s an attempt to accelerate progress in the Redis universe. https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB
    - 7y ago

vemv 7y ago

I find the bucket-of-crabs observation super interesting. It's likely a problem not often talked about (nobody likes to admit or suggest envy). At the same time, there is some justification when developers get put off by certain OSS projects. I think 90% of OSS projects shouldn't exist at all, just like 90% of music releases (think dozens of millions of songs!) shouldn't exist at all. "I made a thing" != "this thing should be shared/promoted". Projects so often lack rationale, research and rigour. Of course, solving your own problem for yourself is always fine, but sharing it with the world should imply some caution.

moron4hire 7y ago
I think the problem is that there is much more emphasis on the technology stack and trendy patterns than there is on the actual product. When I build software, I build it for a purpose and it is designed for maintainability. I'm not doing it just to play around with a new toy. But it seems most of the attention goes towards toys. I swear, most of the ML projects I see right now are basically, "I totally figured out how to setup TensorFlow and stumbled on a large set of pre-existing training data." The resulting project looks unusable as a product or component of a product. And given the difficulty in setting up the environment and finding training sets, I have some doubts as to replicability or even likelihood anyone will try to replicate it. It almost feels like you could create completely fake results and nobody would question it. Not meant to be a shot at the ML field, but more at the technology "community" that consumes this stuff. It's like magazine articles vs books. Everyone reading articles about books, literary critique, discussing authors and genres. Few people actually reading books. Fewer still writing them.