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Ask HN: Is there a platform for free development?
I had a thought for creating a platform where developers offer to develop solutions to problems for companies for free but the developers get to choose the technology they wish to use.
The goal would be to get hobbist to try out their technological ideas on real world problems without financial risks to the problem givers.
Is there such a platform? Kickstarter is not what I have in mind, that's hoping to get money to do something. This is doing something to prove it works.
- andsoitis 3y agoVery few solutions don’t need to integrate with other systems. As such, I think you need to change the premise of “the developers get to choose the technology they wish to use” Good luck!
- wg0 3y agoand that in business settings, livelihood of many is dependent on timely delivery or at least guaranteed delivery. You can't say oh I am sorry, could not build your online order system because Rust async ecosystem is so fractured and SQLite is written in C so I can't accept that while the tech stack is all Rust + Typescript with TRPC + Tailwind.
- Towaway69 3y agoTrue but the types of problems I imagine are those that companies have but have imperfect workarounds. Central to the entire premise is that these problems are not core to the business, rather things that are itches but not wounds yet.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoIsn’t this just what free open-source software does already?
- Towaway69 3y agoFree open source software does not necessarily solve real world problems, it solves someones problem but not necessarily the problem at hand.
- schwartzworld 3y agoAnd yet, almost every piece of commercial software is built on the free labor of open source devs
- Towaway69 3y agoBut is it free labour? Many work for companies that pay their salary. It's the ones who work on technology in their free time but can't reach a bigger market who I would like to reach with this idea. Those that work not for money but because they are convinced by an idea.
- schwartzworld 3y agoI would say that paid open source work is the exception, not the rule.
- Towaway69 3y agoThere must be surveys on this somewhere. It would be interesting to know how exactly all these open source developers feed themselves. Reminds of that meme - will code HTML for food.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoI hope I’m not making a strawman of your idea. So you want developers to work for free on whatever it is a company wants, with the only caveat that the dev gets to choose the tech stack? What is the value of the platform to the dev at that point? They can do that already without a middleman telling them what to work on. Furthermore, what company wants free work that might be totally irrelevant if the tech stacks don’t align?
- az09mugen 3y agoThere might be https://fr.fiverr.com/ https://fr.fiverr.com/ that could answer your question. I don't know if there is a minimum charge. But it's very generalized, the site is for any kind of creation (music, image, code,...)