Chris, thanks for sort of reviving the old thread I had before the
war: I'm slowly coming back to my more regular Open Source life from
all the craziness of the past two months. Because of that, there's not
much to report back -- but I will share a few points and comment on a
few of yours. Hope this will help move things along.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 3:11 PM Christofer Dutz
<christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> now that the Aprils Fool Joke has worn off a bit, I think I can post this
> here. I at first suggested this in the board list before April 1st, as I
> wanted to make sure this hasn’t been wiped off the table as a silly idea
> before.
>
> Turns out that I didn’t get a single “silly idea” response.
>
> As you all might know I have been working on finding ways to finance my work
> on open-source, but in an open-source way that others can also profit from
> what I might find out.
>
> There are some projects that managed to form or attract companies to grow
> around them. These usually don’t have problems finding funds to finance
> further development.
> However, we also have a large number of projects that are not as big, or a
> large number of people working on our projects, but don’t work for those
> companies.
>
> So, these people are generally relying on finding contracts themselves. This
> usually is problematic as many larger companies don’t do business with
> individuals.
> Also is it often tricky to get the legal documents and contracts right and
> then not even talking about how long payments usually take.
>
> Another thing is that the ASF is a non-profit organization and therefore it’s
> challenging to advertise commercial offerings around Apache projects.
>
> As an example: One of the things I found out with my crowd-funding experiment
> is that this doesn’t work. Admittedly I wasn’t expecting it to work.
> Companies just can’t donate large amounts of money without any assurances.
> But I did learn one thing: My crowd-funding experiment was in a way the most
> successful thing I did.
>
> The thing was, that I listed up things that could be on the roadmap and I
> added a price-tag to them. This is one thing an Apache project just couldn’t
> do. So even if I didn’t get a single cent in donations for my work, I was
> approached by multiple companies willing to finance individual campaigns, but
> with a normal consulting contract.
>
> Now there are also companies like Tidelift, that want to close this gap.
> However, we are still a bit unsure how to align the interest of that company
> with the values of the ASF. And there’s the fact that not everyone is able to
> profit from Tidelift. I for example tried reaching out to them several times
> for offering commercial PLC4X support, but the only responses I got, were
> people wanting to discuss how my business could profit from using more
> open-source ;-) So for me Tidelift is not an option as not everyone can use
> it.
>
> Now let me get to my idea:
> What If there was a separate legal entity closely related to the ASF (Let’s
> call it “Support Inc.” for now). I would even propose that the oversight
> entity for Support Inc. should be the ASF board. This would assure the
> company is perfectly in-line with the ASF and its values.
First of all, I 100% agree with Sam -- there's absolutely 0 reason
that I see these two entities should have (structurally!) any more
ties than ASF and let's say Cloudera. If you disagree on that point
strongly -- now would be a good time to list all your reasons for why.
Back to building an independent business: my hypothesis back when I
started the Tidelift thread is that we basically have two choices:
1. piggy back off of somebody who is already doing a similar kind of
a business (and convince them to tweak it to be fully aligned with
ASF's vision)
2. have a brand new business
This thread of yours seem to be focused on #2 so I'll stay with that
(and will comment on #1 in a separate thread).
I'll start with saying that I've been talking to a LOT of my VC and
OSS Foundations friends about #2 lately and the consensus seems to be
that it is all about the economics of bootstrapping this kind of a
business. The economics simply doesn't seem to work out (at least not
in the US market) until you hit a certain number of customers AND
committers in what, effectively, can be described as a marketplace. We
can debated at what # of both of these you can hope to be at least
somewhat revenue neutral, but it is pretty clear that the numbers are
significant. Effectively, you need seed money.
This kind of seed money can either come from (please add to the list
if I missed anything):
1. large Co's (FANG, etc.)
2. traditional VCs
3. non-traditional VCs
#1 I am not hopeful -- and if there's anyone on this list who can help
move a needle in that direction I'd love to hear about that
#2 the feedback universally is "you're proposing to build a
marketplace, there's a few already (e.g. Tidelif), please explain why
yours will be any better/different/etc. -- if you can't at least go
talk to existing ones and try to join forces"
#3 (this could be something as crazy as Elon Musk seeding it btw) is
where I'm focusing right now (plus a bit of "go talk to them" from #2)
At any rate -- until there's a concrete proposal about where this kind
of money can come from -- I don't think we will be making any
progress.
But suppose we (and by "we" here I mean a group of individuals in the
ASF who would want to step up as founders of something like this) did
get some money -- we will have to have some rules of engagement with
the ASF.
That seems to be the rest of your points:
> Individuals could sign up on Support Inc’s website for providing commercial
> services around Apache projects. These services could be Consulting, Feature
> development, Training, Commercial Support.
> On this site a user could also add possible feature-development campaigns
> with a price-tag attached, just like I did on my website.
>
> If a company wants to finance a feature, get support, consulting, or training
> around an Apache project, this would be the well-known website somebody would
> go to first.
>
> Support Inc. would provide the contracts
Obvious point, but this is exactly where the liability starts and it
needs to be managed (for which seed $$$ is required).
> and therefore the individual wouldn’t have to (I usually spent
> 2000-4000€/year on legal advice for stuff like that).
Yup. The economy of scale will obviously help, but not until we hit
100s of participants in our marketplace.
> Also, would Support Inc. be a bigger company the customer would be doing
> business with, which would probably ease the problem of getting into the
> companies with Chris Inc.
Business development/marketing for Support Inc. will also require seed.
> The contracts would be between the Support Inc. and the customer, and the
> customer would pay to Support Inc. The developer would have a contract with
> Support Inc. and be paid from this but give Support Inc. a certain percentage
> of the contact to cover its expenses (But in contrast to other pure
> for-profit companies, this cut would be a lot less than usual).
Again -- typical marketplace mechanics -- all great but (cue tons of
MBA articles on Uber, etc.) requires "buying" at least one end of it
(typically with VC money) first.
> Now a developer could probably choose from different models, where he gets
> paid instantly (but then give Support Inc. a bigger cut of the profits) or
> wait for the customer to pay.
> The services the new company would provide, would be taking care of the
> payments, the legal issues and provide the infrastructure for finding
> commercial support offerings.
> And if people know this is something integrated into the general open-source
> ecosystem, I assume people would probably try less to screw with as they know
> it might backfire PR-wise, just like dragging the ASF to court wouldn’t be
> the smartest thing to do.
>
> If the company earns money, it could become a sponsor of the ASF.
>
> What do you think?
>
> I hope you’re now not going to point at me laughing because I like the idea.
I think:
0. I am *really* excited about this -- to a point where I'd love to
be one of the founder's in a business like that, but we need at least
a few more
1. I DO NOT think it is viable as an "organic growth" type of a
business -- hence it'll required seed
Putting both of these together -- for now I'll focus on trying to
finding an existing marketplace we can mold to our needs. I'm still
bullish on Tidelift, but I need to re-start a few discussions with
them on particulars.
Thanks,
Roman.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
