Yeah, That's exactly what I wanted to address. The bootstrapping: creating contacts for the different types of services (legal) , setup and run the infrastructure to serve the offers I want to do and keep them updated and patched (infrastructure), handling payments and chacing after companies not willing to pay (finance), establish a place people know to offer the services (marketing and pr) (this is probably the thing requiring most work) and something to not appear to be a solo fighter, but be part of something bigger.
I for my part have invested a big part of my last years on all of this. In the end I failed mainly because my company is too small and can't compete with the big closed-source names. Now I'm planning on ending my business after 24 years, as I'm tired of fighting. But I would hate to see others in the same situation, so I would love to help others be successful. If what I learned the hard way helps, that's the open-source idea on a next level. And I think something like what I proposed would probably be the thing I personally would have loved to have had and I probably would still be fully self-employed, if such a thing existed. Thinking of my green energy supplier: when I saw the certificate of approval, that Greenpeace attests them serving truly green energy, that convinced me to choose them. Perhaps some form of "Apache approves the way this thing works"-certificate that needs to be renewed (yearly), could be a form to do this without any problematic ties? Chris Holen Sie sich Outlook für Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ Von: Matt Sicker <boa...@gmail.com> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 21. April 2022, 19:50 An: dev@community.apache.org <dev@community.apache.org> Betreff: Re: [DISCUSS] Crazy or good Idea? On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 9:08 AM Jarek Potiuk <ja...@potiuk.com> wrote: > ... (snip) > This is a model similar to many ASF projects commercial activities - > there are people, individuals with merit and experience in the project > and they decide to start or join a commercial company that puts their > stakes with the project. There are many stories like that and even if > some of the people are PMC members and committers that might work. > I see that it could work here as well. I think it is important to see > if there can be a real business model behind it. On top of doing "good > support" for the contributors, such a company would have to simply > have some business model and be a normal "business" I think. I think I get your point here, though this sort of feels like punting the idea back to "figure out how to be an Influencer® on your own!" As a software engineer (particularly in the domain of software development software itself), I find it much easier to write code, design systems, fix bugs, and other daily work I'm already used to performing as an individual contributor at any company. Having all the other skills necessary to run a business has never really been interesting to me (and I assume similarly for many others), so such an approach feels somewhat like trying to make it big on the 'gram or the 'tok (i.e., marketing, publicity, PR, copywriting, artwork, etc., either provided by yourself or paid for by someone else as a "sponsor"). Christofer's proposal sounds more like a way to try to bootstrap past that issue, though I can see why it would be fairly difficult to align with the ASF's values of vendor independence. Maybe there's some sort of hybrid approach possible similar to ALCs where a sort of business development kit is provided for people to more easily create firms for development et al. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
