5 ms·

Ask HN: Open-source project as startup?

• cool-RR 18y ago
  If anyone is wondering what the project is about, it is a framework for writing simulations in Python. It could take any kind of simulation: Physics, game theory, epidemic spread, electronics, whatever. (Yes, I know of SimPy, it's something different.)
  • carterschonwald 18y ago
    How is a general framework useful? Unless you're also providing access to a slew of algorithms that can quickly solve a large pool of nontrivial special cases, it sounds like you're just providing a "perl" glue for modelling code, albeit in python. What sort of game theory problems are you thinking about, I have a pretty solid background in algorithmics of that stuff, (which will transition from solid to novel research level soon :p, so i'd be curious as to what you think are settings where someone would like to do game theory modelling)
    • cool-RR 18y ago
      I'll try to answer your questions: How is a general framework useful? When you're coding a simulation, you spend about 10% of your time coding the actual algorithm, and 90% of your time coding other things. The purpose of my project is to do that 90% for you, and to do it thoroughly. For example, saving the simulation data to a file. Or being able to rewind the simulation and change something in its world, and then running the simulation from that point and watching what that change will cause. Or having the machine calculate two different "possible futures" concurrently. These are the basic features, and I know it doesn't sound like something very complicated, but if you think it's simple, I challenge you to find me a framework that allows to work comfortably with simulations. What sort of game theory problems are you thinking about Generally, whatever you want. I'm not a game theorist, but here's what I coded a year ago: A hundred computer players play 50 rounds of the prisoner's dillemma with each other, and they get paired randomly after every session. Every player had a certain strategy chosen from a pool of strategies. When a player lost a lot of points, the computer replaced it with a new player with a random strategy. It was very interesting and I saw some very cool behaviors. So you'd be able to do stuff like that on my program.
  • hedgehog 18y ago
    Sounds interesting, is there already code up somewhere?
    • cool-RR 18y ago
      Yes indeed: http://github.com/cool-RR/physicsthing/tree/master http://github.com/cool-RR/physicsthing/tree/master Please keep in mind that it's a very young project. Run gui.py in that folder to see a demonstration. The code requires wxPython and that Windows Extensions thing by Mark Hammond. The readme is a bit out-dated: When I wrote it I was mainly thinking about physics simulations, and today it's more general. Come back there in a month and you'll see some serious stuff.
      • hedgehog 18y ago
        Very cool. I like the idea of building games with relativistic physics, kind of reminds me of the short "Carousel" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YFkcwtpGZo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YFkcwtpGZo)
        • huhtenberg 18y ago
          Very cool short, but I don't see how it is even remotely related to relativistic physics..
  • SwellJoe 18y ago
    Are you familiar with SciPy? The company behind SciPy, Enthought, had revenue in the millions when I last worked with them three years ago and were doubling every year. They are predominantly a service business, however, and provide custom software for a few very large clients (oil and gas industry, and one very large consumer products company). They've moved slowly in the direction of products rather than services, but I don't think they've ever quite made the break from being a custom software shop for (very profitable) niche markets. I explained their business as a way of saying that while you can build a profitable business and make yourself rich on the kind of tools you're talking about (the founders of Enthought are doing very well for themselves and could probably sell the company tomorrow and retire multi-millionaires; they're also doing fantastic things for their Open Source community at the same time), you can't raise money in the valley for that kind of company. Until you figure out how to productize what you're doing, and make it possible to increase revenue faster than you increase head count, you aren't building a startup. You might be building a business, and that might be awesome, but valley investors pretty much only invest in startups.
    • cool-RR 18y ago
      By the way, do Enthought have something for simulations?
      • SwellJoe 18y ago
        Yes, though I don't know enough about the field to say how it relates to what you're doing. I was holding them up as a business model to look at, not as an example of "here's your competition", though maybe they are. I dunno. They work with geological data to help oil companies build safe platforms (losing a platform to a natural gas deposit costs millions of dollars and occasionally human lives, for example, so the amount they're willing to spend to prevent it from happening is incredibly high), as well as profitable and efficient wells. They also work with fluid dynamics data for a consumer products company, to make sure your toothpaste comes out of the tube without splattering, etc. All seem like "simulations" to me. But I don't know. Visualization is a big part of what they do, as well, and SciPy has awesome realtime visualization capabilities (lots of folks also like MatPlotLib, which works nicely with SciPy).
• mahmud 18y ago
  In terms of profitability, a simulation software would be hard to monetize as "software as service"; anybody technically inclined to want to do simulations will probably have a lab unix flavors, parallel libraries and other goodies to just download your tarball and run it themselves. Simulation is not exactly sales automation, data capture, billing or inventory. Your best bet is to reach out to federal safety and security agency, and sell them a heavily customized version of the tool (usually the problem du jour; few years ago was terrorism, now it's home foreclosure, job loses, etc.) you will be prepared to have a few PhDs on board to sell it to the governments and you might need to reach out to your local governments and municipalities.
• delano 18y ago
  I can't speak in regards to whether it makes sense to apply to YC, but from a general perspective, a company that produces open sources software is no different than any other business: you need to clearly understand how you will generate a profit. The answer may be consulting but that's a difficult route b/c anyone can generate a profit from consulting. It's not unique. You need to figure out how to provide something that's better than everyone else. As Warren Buffet would say, you need a moat.
  • tptacek 18y ago
    That's not the problem with consulting at all. Consulting is, if anything, far more defensible than a typical product. The problem with consulting is that it doesn't scale. You can only deliver it with trained consultants, who cost lots of money. Build a good product and you can sell it to 100 people as easily as you can to 10. That's why products are considered better money than consulting.
    • delano 18y ago
      That's true. Your point is more clear than mine. What I intended to say is that it's difficult to differentiate one consultancy from another. You have to do that based on clearly proven, previous performance. When you're starting a new company, it's easier to sell something that's new (like a service or product).
      • tptacek 18y ago
        I don't understand the point you're trying to make. It is just as hard to differentiate a product as it is to differentiate a consultancy. And there are far more differences between consultancies than "experience".
        • delano 18y ago
          This thread is about open source software. My point is that it's easier to differentiate open source software from other open source projects than it is to differentiate a consultancy from other consultancies. The reason is simple: a customer can try out an open source project for free.
• huhtenberg 18y ago
  How are you planning to make money ?
  • cool-RR 18y ago
    I know, it's the question. But I recall pg claiming something to the effect of "if it's something people want, don't worry, we'll find a way to make money from it." (I'm probably not 100% accurate with this quote, I don't remember exactly how he said it.)
    • blender 18y ago
      He said: "Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money." Cheers
    • braindead_in 18y ago
      Few obvious things which come to mind. 1) Dual licensing 2) Charge for commercial support 3) Sell hosted versions (might not apply to you) 4) Advertising?
      • huhtenberg 18y ago
        #1 and #2 require substantial legal expense and a lot of subsequent sales and support management effort. And unless a founder has a prior experience building this kind of organizational infrastructure, it will be a very painful experience to go through. All in all, it's a project that is simply too risky for the investors to put their money into.
    • gojomo 18y ago
      I think the subtext of that advice is that you're still making something that is eventually excludable/controllable, so you have options. For an open-source library, the right-to-fork and to use without paying licensing fees means many of the options used by other startups which defer revenue questions in favor of building an enthusiastic userbase are already off the table for you. You can't easily withhold your product unless fees are paid; you can't add advertising; you may not be in a position to sell excludable complementary offerings. You could try a dual-licensing structure like Sleepycat BerkeleyDB -- free for other open-source projects, pay if you want to use in a closed-source application. However, that presupposes a large closed-source commercial market for the software your library-users make, requires some capability for closing big corporate sales, and it may take years of proven library quality before becoming the solid/safe choice for companies to embed in their own products.
• tptacek 18y ago
  Wasn't Webmin an open source project?
  • cool-RR 18y ago
    Did they operate like a startup? Where can I read about it?
    • tptacek 18y ago
      They're a YC company now.
      • mahmud 18y ago
        it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator. neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else. And with respect to the mentoring, i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers; their clients and market base are in the shared hosting industry. Hope I'm wrong about this.
        • SwellJoe 18y ago
          "it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator" We don't think so. Webmin is an Open Source project. Virtualmin, Inc. is a business. The business is new, and had pretty low recognition when we accepted YC funding. We're still not as well known as a company as we are as an Open Source project, but we are finding more and more of our customers have never used or heard of Webmin. "neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else." This makes assumptions about us and our company that aren't accurate. We weren't looking for funding for our Open Source projects. We've funded them just fine on our own for 11 years; Jamie and I have lived off of our Webmin-related projects for most of our professional careers. Now we are building a product startup that has a shared codebase and a large number of shared objectives to our Open Source projects. Building a business (a startup, and not a consulting business) is a very different process than building a successful Open Source project. We wanted some help with the former. YC provided it. "i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers" We'd rather you not group cPanel and Webmin together like that. They aren't even in the same market. Webmin is for system administrators, cPanel (and Virtualmin) is for hosting providers and their customers. Webmin happens to have been used by hosting providers a lot over the years, but it's a general purpose administration tool in use by large and small companies and individuals all over the world. I won't make claims about how hackers feel about Webmin, but I will mention that Webmin is downloaded more than 2 million times per year. I can't think of who else would be downloading it from SourceForge. It's a UNIX system administrators tool. A very large percentage of UNIX system administrators are also hackers. It also makes me a very sad panda to know that you think we do the things that cPanel does that makes hackers hate cPanel (and thus think those same hackers should dislike what we do). We don't generate config files from templates...we parse them and edit them. We respect comments, file order, and if we don't understand a directive (say, for an Apache module we don't know about) we won't break it. We work the way the OS does, respecting file locations and defaults (like Debian's sites-enabled/sites-available, or the per-interface iptables stuff), and go to great lengths to do so (have a look at the hundreds of per-OS config files found in Webmin for an understanding of just how great those lengths are). And, we provide copious documentation, over one thousand printed pages worth, for how things are working and how they map to the underlying system. All of these things are dramatically different from cPanel, and are designed from the perspective of "I want a tool that helps me do my job rather than forcing the world to revolve around it".
• mixmax 18y ago
  The major problem is that you don't really have a competitive advantage. What will stop your potential competitors from simply downloading the open-source software and start using it themselves? When you do a startup you want to find a good niche that makes good money, and where competition won't start pouring in once you've proven that there is a market. So you need some kind of barrier, with YC startups it seems to be technology.
• teej 18y ago
  The Phusion guys tried doing it and have had a really hard time making it work. And these are guys who have essentially turned the Rails world upside down with their OSS.
  • nir 18y ago
    It did work out ok for MySQL and JBoss, though ;) Phusion offers a focused product - you install it, usually very easily, and you're done. It's hard to see a simple way to monetize it other than charge money for the product itself (thereby harming its market share). They might be able to sell support contracts or professional services, though. On the other hand, if you're selling a service, seems to me you could benefit, or at least not lose anything, by opening your source. Would Twitter be doing worse if their software was open? They might actually have had better code by now, since so many coders use their product. Also, you might build your product on top of an OSS codebase, using the accumulated code and domain knowledge as foundation. AFAIK that this is what Boxee is doing with XBMR. Also consider Wordpress - being open source helped it become a leading platform, later facilitating wordpress.com which has a pretty decent business model.
  • tptacek 18y ago
    It seems more likely to me that they're having a hard time making it work because there isn't a lot of money to be made in the market they've chosen. Accelerated X11 was also not a great proposition. JBoss made it work because they were a pin-compatible replacement for something IBM was already charging a fortune for to large enterprises. But Phusion sells to the cool kids, not the suits, and the cool kids shop at thrift stores.
• russell 18y ago
  The crux of the matter is how are you going to make money? After all investors want a payback. The best advice I've seen here is to find a consulting niche in security. See if DARPA has something on their wish list or apply directly. I suggest you do some serious networking in your city/state. Maybe team up with someone who needs your platform to leverage their expertise. Tell us where you are. Maybe someone might have a lead.
  • cool-RR 18y ago
    Tell us where you are. Maybe someone might have a lead. (Drumroll...) Jerusalem, Israel.
• tdoggette 18y ago
  My advice: You've given up a lot of copyright protections on your code. Register trademarks, and defend them. Your code is freely distributable, but you can still protect yourself against people using your name for their own profit. Look at what Mozilla does, for example.
  • mahmud 18y ago
    He has given up nothing. Free software is freedom, and don't forget that 99% of the time people have the freedom to IGNORE whatever you publish and use something else. You can have your closed-down code base where nobody knows your software, and you're just another hacker. You open source it, get users, and you're suddenly a software publisher; all it takes is for one university or corporation to contact you for help and you're free to ask for compensation. If your software was locked down, you wouldn't have had that lead to begin with.
    • tdoggette 18y ago
      I didn't mean "given up" in a bad way; I was raised on OSS and think it's a great concept. I favor the use of it, even in cases like this., simply because it's a better way of doing things. However, the fact remains that going open source reduces one's ability to control one's work. Trademark protection means that you can't be out-competed by yourself.
• deleted 18y ago
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