I think a good rule of thumb is that if there’s a thing no one does as a hobby, probably very few people will do it for your FOSS project for free
@kissane Is paying for FOSS a thing? E.g. I would need an app that show random cat pictures. FOSS app exists, only shows dogs. Can I pay an unknown person to help out? Asking for a friend with obscure hobbies.
@henry
There's a myriad of funding possibilities around FOSS, ranging from Freemium pricing (e.g. IntelliJ), selling support (Red Hat), customizations and hosting (Gitlab), to selling on an appstore (Osmand) to putting bounties on fixing bugs (BugBounty), sponsoring, donating company time, crowdfunding and targeted funding (NLNet, PrototypeFund) - and paid customized integrations.
The trouble is to match available resources to possible projects.
@kissane
@schmidt_fu @kissane Thanks for the thorough reply. Fascinating that there isn’t a “market place” for tweaks, although many larger projects appear to accept general donations. Not sure whether it’s lack of demand, or lack of awareness. Most users opt for off the shelf solutions, knowing that custom software is much more expensive. I was curious about whether there might be something in between.
@henry @schmidt_fu @kissane Part of the problem is that most "tweaks" require a large amount of context about the underlying project. Even if you find someone who just so happens to be an expert in all of the technologies the project uses (the language, framework, libraries, etc) they'll still have to learn at least a bit of the underlying architecture, conventions and contribution process.
I know plenty of FOSS projects with money but no people to pay to do the work.
@henry @schmidt_fu @kissane (I've written a little bit about the challenge of building context among open source contributors here: https://governingopen.com/resources/context-building-tasks )
@kissane @shauna @schmidt_fu Paraphrasing, the original post asserted likelihood of FOSS availability depends on how common your use case is. There are however probably lots of potential dual or multi use cases, where popularity of related field means actually something quite close to what you need is probably already available.
@henry @schmidt_fu @kissane aside from @shauna 's great points, software development is still often time-consuming specialist work, so a nontrivial feature quickly gets more expensive than is reasonable for a single individual to pay for. Of course pooling initiatives are possible, but come with all kinds of conplexities.
@henry @schmidt_fu @kissane the kind of “tweak” you’re talking about takes at least hours (hundreds of dollars), often days (thousands of dollars), sometimes weeks.
The market does exist; it’s just largely exclusive to enterprise clients, because it’s basically impossible for individuals to afford.
(Below that, there are freelancer platforms such as Fiverr, but you get what you pay for.)
@kissane @billseitz Have you ever seen the “I’m willing to pay” version play out in real life? I don’t have a real world business case, was just curious as to whether this happens occasionally. I understand that a tweak isn’t always trivial, but sometimes it can be.
@henry @kissane part of @kfogel's Producing #OpenSource Software:
How to Run a Successful #FreeSoftware Project
https://producingoss.com/en/
@kfogel @henry @kissane The reality-constraints that can come into play are
1. what rate is the OS-dev willing to work for to do something he doesn't personally care about;
2. how many hours will a "small" change take?
If it's 2hrs x $100/hr then not many "consumers" will want to pay that....
Which pushes toward a crowd-funding model... but if you want to facilitate that, and you're not "part of" the base project "team", do you get a piece of the action? (increment-VC, increment-PM)