DISCLAIMER: This post is incredibly self-serving. It only makes sense if you believe that open source is a cost-effective way of building software and if you believe my contributions to the PyPy project are beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. If you would prefer me to go and "get a real job", you may as well stop reading here.
There is a lot of evidence that startup creation costs are plummeting. The most commonly mentioned factors are the cloud, which brings down hosting costs, Moore's law, which does the same, ubiquitous internet, platforms and open source.
Putting all the other things aside, I would like to concentrate on open source today. Not because it's the most important factor -- I don't have enough data to support that -- but because I'm an open source platform provider working on PyPy.
Open source is cost-efficient. As Alex points out, PyPy is operating on a fraction of the funds and manpower that Google is putting into V8 or Mozilla into {Trace,Jaeger,Spider}Monkey, yet you can list all three projects in the same sentence without hesitation. You would call them "optimizing dynamic language VMs". The same can be said about projects like GCC.
Open source is also people - there is typically one or a handful of individuals who "maintain" the project. Those people are employed in a variety of professions. In my experience they either work on their own or for corporations (and corporate interests often take precedence over open source software), have shitty jobs (which don't actually require you to do a lot of work) or scramble along like me or Armin Rigo.
Let me step back a bit and explain what do I do for a living. I work on NumPy, which has managed to generate slightly above $40,000 in donations so far. I do consulting about optimization under PyPy. I look for other jobs and do random stuff. I think I've been relatively lucky. Considering that I live in a relatively cheap place, I can dedicate roughly half of my time to other pieces of PyPy without too much trouble. That includes stuff that noone else cares about, like performance tools, buildbot maintenance, release management, making json faster etc., etc..
Now, the main problem for me with regards to this lifestyle is that you can only gather donations for "large" and "sellable" projects. How many people would actually donate to "reviews, documentation and random small performance improvements"? The other part is that predicting what will happen in the near future is always very hard for me. Will I be able to continue contributing to PyPy or will I need to find a "real job" at some point?
I believe we can come up with a solution that both creates a reasonable economy that makes working on open source a viable job and comes with relatively low overheads. Gittip and Kickstarter are recent additions to the table and I think both fit very well into some niches, although not particularly the one I'm talking about.
I might not have the solution, but I do have a few postulates about such an economical model:
- It cannot be project-based (like kickstarter), in my opinion, it's much more efficient just to tell individuals "do what you want". In other words -- no strings attached. It would be quite a lot of admin to deliver each simple feature as a kickstarter project. This can be more in the shades of gray "do stuff on PyPy" is for example a possible project that's vague enough to make sense.
- It must be democratic -- I don't think a government agency or any sort of intermediate panel should decide.
- It should be possible for both corporations and individuals to donate. This is probably the major shortcoming of Gittip.
- There should be a cap, so we don't end up with a Hollywood-ish system where the privileged few make lots of money while everyone is struggling. Personally, I would like to have a cap even before we achieve this sort of amount, at (say) 2/3 of what you could earn at a large company.
- It might sound silly, but there can't be a requirement that a receipent must reside in the U.S. It might sound selfish, but this completely rules out Kickstarter for me.
The problem is that I don't really have any good solution -- can we make startups donate 5% of their future exit to fund individuals who work on open source with no strings attached? I heavily doubt it. Can we make VCs fund such work? The potential benefits are far beyond their event horizon, I fear. Can we make individuals donate enough money? I doubt it, but I would love to be proven wrong.
Yours, leaving more questions than answers,
fijal
