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Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do --

by garry 14y ago

Thanks for this note. It's very much great advice, and right now we're heads down coding. I've never started a foundation and I have much more reading to do -- but it sounds like the right way to codify our pledge more permanently.

8ig8 14y ago
A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support. Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.
joeyh 14y ago
A foundation is one approach, and a valid one. You might end up with something like archive.org, except with a Wayback Machine that serves up actual historical content. (This would be an interesting direction for archive.org to take their Wayback Machine, if they could get sites like Posterus to donate the domain and data at shutdown.) Another approach is to build a service where you make no promises about hosting content forever, but find ways to ensure that users own their data, and have full freedom of migration if you should close down. Since 2010 I've been running http://branchable.com/ http://branchable.com/ , which takes this approach. The same git clone of their site that users can make to edit it contains all their data and configuration. It's built on an open engine http://ikiwiki.info/ http://ikiwiki.info/ , so users can switch away at any time, with no conversion. Ikiwiki is a static site builder, so users can host on S3 or github, or anywhere if they decide to stop using Branchable. Even the management and business logic are open software, so if we folded tomorrow and someone wanted, they could recreate us using http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/ http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/ Branchable is not designed to have a fast burn, but we've had slow and steady growth, and happy users who continue paying the bills each month. There's a lot of room in this space for sites serving different sets of users in ways that don't turn them into extruded VC product, so welcome to it!

by garry 14y ago

8ig8 14y ago

A foundation is basically a way of separating you from your current ideals. The reality is that it is easy for a person to get tempted by external factors: you need to pay the rent, you feel like people are taking advantage of your offering. There is a lot of liability there. Too risky for me to invest. But, if you establish a group of people that are not personal stakeholders, they believe in the cause, and it is very difficult to them to individually change direction, I'll be more likely to trust and provided financial support. Basically you're one person and you're human and we know how humans act. A foundation provides some insurance for my investment.

joeyh 14y ago

A foundation is one approach, and a valid one. You might end up with something like archive.org, except with a Wayback Machine that serves up actual historical content. (This would be an interesting direction for archive.org to take their Wayback Machine, if they could get sites like Posterus to donate the domain and data at shutdown.) Another approach is to build a service where you make no promises about hosting content forever, but find ways to ensure that users own their data, and have full freedom of migration if you should close down. Since 2010 I've been running http://branchable.com/ http://branchable.com/ , which takes this approach. The same git clone of their site that users can make to edit it contains all their data and configuration. It's built on an open engine http://ikiwiki.info/ http://ikiwiki.info/ , so users can switch away at any time, with no conversion. Ikiwiki is a static site builder, so users can host on S3 or github, or anywhere if they decide to stop using Branchable. Even the management and business logic are open software, so if we folded tomorrow and someone wanted, they could recreate us using http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/ http://ikiwiki-hosting.branchable.com/ Branchable is not designed to have a fast burn, but we've had slow and steady growth, and happy users who continue paying the bills each month. There's a lot of room in this space for sites serving different sets of users in ways that don't turn them into extruded VC product, so welcome to it!