4 ms·

Why should a developer or a contributor pay to help develop something for the community ? seems a little too money making and less community driven.

whalesalad 14y ago
What the fuck? Are you joking? We now live in a world where developers bust their asses to deliver 99 cent applications. It's fucked. Slowly, here and there, we're beginning to see a shift. People will pay for a great product, especially if it makes your job as a hacker/developer easier. Play with the demo for 60 seconds. How long would it take you to build that? How much do you charge per hour? I built a lightweight ORM for pymongo/mongodb last weekend from an empty .py file. It was fun, but it was challenging and took pretty much the entire weekend. And it's basic. You can find, find_by_id, find_one, and a few other things. What these guys have done is tremendously impressive and difficult to do. They deserve every right to ask for money and that will only fuel further development. Everyone has to keep the lights on at some point.
- ericingram 14y ago
  You get at the core of the issue here, which is that we can save developers a huge amount of time with the right mix of pre-built components and dedicated developer support. All of our paid options surround the idea that developers can go faster and better leverage their time with time-sensitive help. We've all become used to Stackoverflow saving the day, but if the answer doesn't magically pop up in Google, we can waste many hours chasing it needlessly. I hope the future is full of paid open source options.
  - mst 14y ago
    Same here. The mixture of support contracts, straight up donations and the Varnish Moral License that varnish offers is, I think, a taste of things to come. Mixing support and patronage is, I think, the answer - patronage is a means to ensure the software is better, support contracts a hedge against it sucking - but if you combine the two so money spent is never perceived by the customer as wasted, the result is really quite interesting.
ericingram 14y ago
I understand this sentiment. The goal of Forward is different than what you're probably used to in open source e-commerce. We believe open source is ideal for most software, but community-only projects suffer from a lack of central ownership and support. I would adopt more open source solutions if there were professional developer support available. That's our goal here. We want to be there when a developer needs help. No more empty support forums where you have to pray for someone to kindly answer your question. At the same time, if you prefer to just take the code and run, that's fine too, we don't own these ideas :)

whalesalad 14y ago

What the fuck? Are you joking? We now live in a world where developers bust their asses to deliver 99 cent applications. It's fucked. Slowly, here and there, we're beginning to see a shift. People will pay for a great product, especially if it makes your job as a hacker/developer easier. Play with the demo for 60 seconds. How long would it take you to build that? How much do you charge per hour? I built a lightweight ORM for pymongo/mongodb last weekend from an empty .py file. It was fun, but it was challenging and took pretty much the entire weekend. And it's basic. You can find, find_by_id, find_one, and a few other things. What these guys have done is tremendously impressive and difficult to do. They deserve every right to ask for money and that will only fuel further development. Everyone has to keep the lights on at some point.

ericingram 14y ago
You get at the core of the issue here, which is that we can save developers a huge amount of time with the right mix of pre-built components and dedicated developer support. All of our paid options surround the idea that developers can go faster and better leverage their time with time-sensitive help. We've all become used to Stackoverflow saving the day, but if the answer doesn't magically pop up in Google, we can waste many hours chasing it needlessly. I hope the future is full of paid open source options.
- mst 14y ago
  Same here. The mixture of support contracts, straight up donations and the Varnish Moral License that varnish offers is, I think, a taste of things to come. Mixing support and patronage is, I think, the answer - patronage is a means to ensure the software is better, support contracts a hedge against it sucking - but if you combine the two so money spent is never perceived by the customer as wasted, the result is really quite interesting.

ericingram 14y ago

I understand this sentiment. The goal of Forward is different than what you're probably used to in open source e-commerce. We believe open source is ideal for most software, but community-only projects suffer from a lack of central ownership and support. I would adopt more open source solutions if there were professional developer support available. That's our goal here. We want to be there when a developer needs help. No more empty support forums where you have to pray for someone to kindly answer your question. At the same time, if you prefer to just take the code and run, that's fine too, we don't own these ideas :)