Tux Machines

Plasma Products

Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 13, 2023

Android Leftovers

today's howtos

In the open-source world, we’re quite familiar with projects. Write some code to solve a problem, make sure it works for you, maybe put it in a Git repo, and voila! A product is mostly personal; you scratch an itch and improve your life a bit. It’s how everything starts.

Then you put your Git repo online to share your project with others, and it begins to transform into a product. A product is outward-focused; its purpose is to be of value to others. To succeed, it must grow organizational components such as defined scopes of features and support, documentation, promotion and advertising, methods of distribution and updating, formalized feedback channels, decision-making processes, and so on.

This transition is hard, and it can burn out FOSS maintainers of productized projects who suddenly find themselves corresponding with rude strangers without pay and lacking the time to focus on the parts of the project they found fun. It takes a very special and rare kind of volunteer to consistently do this work for free.

In the commercial world, product development and maintenance is sustained by the money people pay to buy the product. But in the FOSS world, we’re in this awkward valley where our products are frequently competitive in functionality and reach with the commercial ones, but we don’t generally charge money or benefit from a funding stream to keep them going sustainably.

Read on

↺ Read on

gemini.tuxmachines.org