A New Non-Money Oriented Crowdsourcing Platform Based On Code Contributions (crowdsourcer.io) 84
An anonymous reader shares a new crowdfunding site built on open source principles to "remove the money element from project creation" so creators "don't have to take extreme actions such as quitting their jobs or compromising on their ideas because of investor demands. Because of the nature of crowdsourcer.io projects, project creators can remain as ambitious as funded projects and get all the contributors they need to make their idea a reality."
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
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The dollar is good for all debts public and private.
Bartering your services as payment means you may not have the skills that a particular project needs.
Paying means you can hire staff to do the work even if it isn't a project they personally want or need.
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The dollar is good for all debts public and private.
That may be true, but the bail-outs learn us that your dollar is good for someone else's debts. Cutting out the evil middle men can only improve the situation.
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I guess you got the Cable News lesson.
The Bail out had saved ourselves in spite of our personal feelings about it. The problem was the banks took on risky loans with a mechanism that allowed to reduce the risk of loaning out to the individual loan. Your sub prime loan being split to a hundred lenders means if you had individually failed. The cost of failure will be small amounts across a lot of companies. So just as long only small number of people fail on their loans things are all good, Being that ever
So.... (Score:2)
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that's why (one reason why) I use the GPL.
If you use GPL software written by someone else, you are using their free labor to profit yourself. If you use GPL in software you write, you are doing free labor to create profit for someone else. So you're doing the same thing as the startup you're criticizing.
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With kickstarter, you can donate a small amount, like $25. WIth code, $25 will buy you almost nothing.
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The GPL is making a deal: you can get my work without money, by exchanging it for any additions you make. (If you want to pay for it, that's possible too).
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Logic of the clueless (Score:1)
By your very blinkered logic, countries which espouse freedom should permit murder, because disallowing murder is a clear restriction on someone's freedom.
Well you probably won't be able to comprehend this, but many things that are considered civilized and ethically sound entail a restriction of freedom, in exchange for which society gains a benefit. This is what raises primitive societies out of a state of self-centered
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Is that a violation? If I take a GPLed project, make changes, and give the improved version to some friends, then my friends have to be able to get the source, and they're free to redistribute under the GPL terms. You have no right to get a copy of the binary, and therefore no right to get a copy of the source.
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I've had this idea for the longest time and only in the last few months worked out the details you're talking about.
Well then, ok, how did you work them out?
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I created the site. Just wanted to clarify, that unlike with real startups, you'll be getting a share of the profits of all sales. They're split up based off of contribution and distributed in the same way to all members of the project, whether they're a contributor or the creator of a project. That's quite literally the entire point of the site! I don't know if it's the wording of the article or the site, but I definitely need to clear this up. Seems like it's been misinterpreted a little.
Quit a job? (Score:2)
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Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Because all but the most trivial problems require a lot of time to write all the code to make it work. You can do it nights and weekends if you don't mind taking so long that your solution becomes moot by the time it's ready.
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That line makes me thing he is an idiot or trolling or has never actually done anything bigger than a shell script or thinks html is a programming language.
Reminds me of the "Why should I pay you money to develop the application? My nephew Vinny has a Tandy and can bang this out in a weekend!" mentality that was prevalent in the 90s. Managers generally thought programmers were worthless because "anybody can sit at a desk and bang on a keybaord all day."
Re: Quit a job? (Score:2)
Meet the new boss - same as the old boss.
Re:Quit a job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Market standards.
When I wrote my first released software, a good idea and a few hundred lines of code would be sufficient to get a customer base, because the odds were good that it was a unique new tool that helped somebody.
Now, to even get customers to try a product, it has to have a good website, professionally-designed interface, and be significantly better in some way than the dozen other equivalent tools available. All of that polish takes time, and if you're working on a spare-time basis, that means it takes a scale of years to produce a viable product. During that time, technology still changes, and that promising library that saved so much time is now obsolete and considered a security risk. Updating the product is possible, but it takes more time, and that means more risk. Finally, when the product is viable, it has to compete with an offering from a bigger company with an established revenue stream.
I don't mean to imply that it's impossible to succeed with spare-time projects, but it is more difficult now than even ten years ago. Software has moved from being a few amusements and office tools to a mature industry driving the majority of our civilization. There's competition out there for most of the current generation of ideas, where there simply wasn't before.
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What would be preferable would be to release the product before the library is obsolete, then have a revenue stream to support an ongoing update schedule to resolve problems as they're found, rather than as spare time permits.
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As someone that has been doing the job for over 20 years... maybe. When I joined in the late 90s people were so desperate for programmers that the vast majority had no degree or a degree in nuclear or chemical engineering or some other scientific field. (Nuclear was popular since so many people went into that in the 80's and TMI basically fucked everyone that graduated in the 80s and 90s with a Nuclear engineering degree.)
Today, not so much. If you are 20 years old with absolutely no experience or formal ed
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Also as far as "anybody can learn to program" goes.... No. Clearly not anyone can do the job, otherwise we wouldn't have so much shitty code out there. :)
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Yeah, this reminds of the "idea people" that I thought were weeded out of existence years ago.
"I have this great idea for an app but I know nothing about programming or the software industry. I want you to write the whole thing do all the engineering and testing and I will only pay you if we make money. But don't worry, I will make tons of money. Err, I mean WE will make tons of money. I totally don't plan on cutting you lose as soon as the cash starts rolling in. Also my idea is totally not illegal/trivial
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Let me first address your questions on the practical features of the site which contribute to making it a fair workplace. And then maybe if I can allay some of those concerns, I can talk about why I genuinely believe it can create a change in the industry even though I know all too well the exploitation of workforce by the
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I've actually got to scoot (dog walking, exercise, you know the drill) so I'll keep this short, but the idea of a centralised governing body is a very good one. To some degree this has developed naturally, for instance hard rules to the system that can't be broken, i.e. projects which don't match the site get rejected by the approval process which we do. E.g. if someone's going on there to
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Call it what it is already. (Score:5, Insightful)
Asking people to donate their time and efforts in lieu of pay is called a charity.
At the end of the day, your donated efforts will line someone's pocket. You're either cool with that or you're not, but enough of the Millennial-flavored marketing bullshit trying to label this as crowd-something simply because it involves more than one human.
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Charity? You're too kind. I'm not. It's utter bullshit.
Re:Call it what it is already. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the creator of the site. I'm guessing from your comment that it's not clear that contributors get paid. Just wanted to clarify that the profits are distributed based off of contribution whether they're the creator of a project or a contributor. Better yet, everyone's contribution is valued at the same level so irrespective of what you're contributing with your time, the money you earn for that "unit" of time will be the same as everyone else. It's essentially a rev-share model weighted by contribution.
Hope this clears stuff up.
a rarefied hill to die on (Score:2)
Treating a diverse group of people as inherently "the same" is not a hill I would personally choose to die on.
May the force fit be with you.