CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@Gina @ethereumfoundation the sexy top project should fund its dependencies

@Gina @ethereumfoundation what does work is this: pay the devs who develop the software you rely on.

we do not have a problem of distributing funds more fairly, we habe a problem of funds.

@Gina @ethereumfoundation i cant find the reference any more, but this sounds like something which i heard of a couple of years back. that was an overdesigned concept where people would pour money in one end and it would magically distribute it "fairly" by relevance.

such a system will never work, and it never needs a blockchain.

the blockchain people still seem desperate to find a applications and still seem to think that their magic would save the world. won't work.

@jessie or maybe dnsmasq, not sure

@jessie a colleague has an unbound configuration which automatically sets up ip routes based on dns names.
i do not have it at hand rn, but maybe an idea to explore? (route all of .uk via the tunnel)

@leeloo very good point! I

@stsp I want our company to stay small.
And FWIW, this model has worked for us for almost 20 years now and I would hope it will continue to.

That's the deal. Take it or leave it.

Final words

We believe you should partner with us, a company that wants to be judged by their action and not in their words. We want to make a real difference. We see how utterly broken this whole industry is and we just decided to not play a sick game.

But if this proposition does not appeal to you, fine. No bad feelings, do whatever you think is best for your company and move on. We're good.

Do not bullshit us with predatory legal text. Do not ask us to guarantee things which no company in the world can guarantee - if you want that, buy insurance instead (and even that won't solve the problem, but we can pretend for a moment that it would). Do not try to sneak into legal text transfer of copyright or ownership. You get the same license as anyone else, "despite" having paid us to do the work, but you also get all the good stuff that some other company paid for. No strings attached.

What we ask from you in return

First and foremost, we charge for hours worked only. We can repackage hours worked if a project requires it, but ultimately, the deal is simple: We work for an hour, you pay us for an hour. We are a service company, even if we (also) write software.

We do not sell a product. We do not sell licenses.

Besides asking for your money in return for our work, we ask you to treat us like who we want to be: A partner who acts in your best interest.

Our promise is an honest open source business model: You pay us, we publish all our work as open source and help you use it in a way which benefits your business the most.

We believe that this value proposition is hard to find matched in the industry. There are many companies 'foss-washing' or 'open-washing' their products by talking an open source narrative, when in fact their entire business model is either upselling closed source components (open core etc), or capturing a market to then close down the license and escalate costs. Red flags for both are contributor license agreements and not accepting outside contributions with relevant value to enterprise users.

This means zero vendor lock in, no usage related cost, no hidden cost. The freedom to continue to work with our software even if you decide to work with other companies for support and development. The freedom to fork.

What is our value proposition and how do we want to work?

We, the team at UPLEX and our freelance partners, strive to provide for our customers and clients, who we regard as partners, excellent technical implementations of superior quality with no strings attached: We publish the most valuable and innovative results of our work under open source licenses, which give you, our customer and client, full power and control over software provided by us.

Long thread coming about how a small FOSS company wants to work with their clients

I received an email which made me realize that we need to be more clear about how we work, how we do not work, the value we provide to our clients and what we ask our clients in return.

I am posting this here in the hope that this text may motivate and help others who are also serious about honest open source business models.

Published under CC BY-SA 4.0 Nils Goroll

#foss #opensource #business