Startup Assembly Banks On Paid, Open-Source Style Development 33
enbody writes A year-old startup, Assembly, is built on the premise of creating products using open-source style development, but structured in a way that you get paid for your contributions. Open-source development is well-known in the Slashdot community, as are a variety of ways to earn a living around open-source, such as support. What is new here is being paid as part of the development, and not just for coding — your contribution might be as project manager or sales. A nice description with video showed up today on the Verge. Of course, the devil is in the details, but they have products so someone in Slashdot land may be interested. (Bias warning: I know one of these guys.)
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Are we taking bets on how long they have before they get sued over the name?
Pro-tip: When you start a company, don't give it a common word as a name, otherwise when people search for your company, 99.99% of the hits are for something else. If they made such a basic and obvious mistake, I doubt if they are going to get much else right.
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you got that wrong. searching for a company name is anecdotical. what you want is that people searching for *the stuff* your company provides lands on your site instead of the competitors'. odds are those people don't even know that your company exists in the first place.
Even "Donkey" would be better, could be trademark (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if you're going to pick a common word, it is another mistake to pick a word that has a commonly understood meaning specific to that industry. If the had picked any random word, such as Donkey, they could defend a trademark for Donkey programming or Donkey software. Can't quite claim a trademark for assembly programming - assembly programming has been around for decades.
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Idk the exact rates, but I heard a project like that thing Linus Torvalds heads could net someone a few dozens bags of cheetos and some cases of mountain dews per month. Honest!
Re:How much does it pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on reading their terms of use, etc., in the majority of cases it will be zero.
Searching the whole site, I was unable to find a single example of a successful "assembly." Not good after "a year of operation."
Also, under their Terms [assembly.com], they can sell your project out from under you at any time:
selected App Ideas will further be developed by the Community and may ultimately be commercialized, produced and licensed or sold by Assembly
... and ,,,
THE COMPANY RESERVES THE RIGHT, FOR ANY OR NO REASON, TO .... (IV) SELL OR LICENSE A SOFTWARE PRODUCT, AND/OR ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RELATED THERETO, TO ANY THIRD PARTY.
There goes any illusion that you're in control.
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Two of four projects profitable, paying contributo (Score:2)
> searching the whole site, I was unable to find a single example of a successful "assembly." Not good after "a year of operation."
I saw two of four projects were turning a profit, which would mean paying dividends to contributors.
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I saw two of four projects were turning a profit, which would mean paying dividends to contributors.
They withhold amounts for chargebacks, any services they provide ("platform costs") , etc., which is why they only agree to pay out "net profits", and reserve the right to not pay out until your individual contribution is worth $100.00 or more. The music industry is very good with playing with "net profits."
What I did find was crap like this [assembly.com]:
This is a recurring bounty that will go to anyone who tweets about Helpful.
Here's a sample tweet, but you can use any one you'd like. Then, just paste the link below and you'll be awarded some...
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The capitalisation of Slashdot titles is incorrect by American standards as well, as anyone with a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style can tell you.
Hard Headline to Parse (Score:1)
Wow that was a hard headline to parse! "What's a start-up assembly bank, and why is it on paid, open-source development?"
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Definitely, for great justice.
We took your name, now give us your code too! (Score:1)
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Open? (Score:2)
Sorry somehow i could not get a list of products without signing up.
And there are no written examples on the html5-web2.0ish HP.
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You can bypass the sign-up by using this link [assembly.com], but it's not exactly obvious (bad UI design, or if it's "by design", they hope to collect your email address by making it non-obvious that there's a back door that doesn't require you to join first).
Remember, they want their ~10% "platform costs" (gross, not net revenue, so it comes off the top). So, you create an app, the app store takes 30%, Assembly takes 10%, and they can, as per their terms of service, sell the product out from under you at any time (so,
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Facebook only reuses crap you post on Facebook. These guys want the right to use anything you do ANYWHERE. That's a real over-reach. You should have some say in how your name, image, and words are used.
Such an overreach it's not even legal in the US, let alone most other places in the English-speaking world.
.. and here's the poisoned term:
You can tell from their terms that the site was founded by some recent lawyer graduates and their scummy MBA friends. The recent lawyer graduates think they can write any terms they like and just because it's written down, it's legal. Their scummy MBA friends think wildly lopsided terms is a great way to make money. They got their MBAs from the Comcast School of Monopolistic Practices. They don't
a nice test of my theory (Score:1)