I think the future of “sustainable” open source software is doing things the @TheLarkInn way.
AFAICT, Sean:
• Hustles to produce content about how great Webpack is
• Responds nicely to every hater on Twitter
• Reaches out to companies using it and asks for money
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Sounds a lot like content marketing, brand management, and sales! A lot of high output devs who fuel open source seem to be mad at companies for not reaching out and giving them money. Someone has to go give others the activation energy to decide to pay!
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Tons of developers would happily work full time on open source tools (obviously, they already kinda do for free). I think demand is there for them getting paid. People need to get out into the market and ask for money!
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I hope someday
@TheLarkInn starts a nonprofit where he trains others to evangelize important projects and pull together money to independently fund lead developers.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likesShow this thread -
Why would others do what
@TheLarkInn did for Webpack? Well, I know lots of people who aren’t in tech but wanna get into it. More that are in it but want to get deeper. I think a lot of people would jump to help fund and evangelize blockchain software and learn more in the process1 reply 0 retweets 0 likesShow this thread -
Right now funding mechanisms are 1. Big company (Shopify) built everything with some open source software (Rails). Now they’re huge and they need experts (hire
@sgrif) 2. Big company needs abstraction that isn’t there (FB) so they build it (React) How do small companies help?2 replies 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
Replying to @backus
For the record I don't think my model is sustainable and I don't recommend it when people ask
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Replying to @sgrif
Yeah I don’t think so either (that was probably unclear). Was mainly trying to point out that you didn’t get to do full time rails until a big company needed it so bad that it was worth paying you to basically do work for the whole ecosystem (and also be an in-house expert)
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I was doing this full time before Shopify. :)
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