Open-source ain’t free
I’m David DeSandro
Today’s subject(s)
- Time
- Scarcity of resources
- Economics
View source
- Like breathing, an invisible act
- Essential learning tool
- Universally available
👁 single watch
👁 watch parts
👁 watches
Free, as in money
Economic environment for development
- Low barrier for entry
- An incredible environment
- creative
- curious
People will make stuff
Incredible resources
- Modernizr
- HTML5 Boilerplate
- Bootstrap
Side-projects
Side projects are great!
- Work on what excites you
- Flex under-used muscles
- Market yourself
- Build and promote your personal brand
- Community gets another tool for its toolkit
Most are free
Culture of free
- Particular to front-end development
- Because of view source
- No paywall
Costs no money to…
- Learn
- Use resources
- Market your stuff
Ideal environment for the impulsively creative
Personal experience with Masonry
- Percolates in the web community
- Picked up by WordPress themes
- …then Tumblr Themes
- Becomes part of the visual language of the web
- Pinterest
👁 Pinterest
👁 rolling in the dough
Happily ever after?
- Managing success
- Emails
- Issues and pull-requests on GitHub
- Stack Overflow
- Tweets
Support requests
- Novice users
- A small fraction of user-base
“I tried X. I tried Y. I just can’t figure it out.”
- Individually, each is manageable
- But they pile up
Jerkface open-source attitude
It’s open-source,
you figure it out.
👁 deal
Managing Masonry
- 8+ hours a week
- Updating docs
- Adding features
- Responding to support requests (ugh)
A matter of economics
- Principles of scarcity
- Availability of resources
- There’s only so many hours in the day
Cost
How valuable is my time?
Instead of…
- Work on what excites you
- Flex under-used muscles
- Market yourself
- Build and promote your personal brand
- Community gets another tool for its toolkit
Why don’t I put a price on this?
Putting a price on something
- Users have to make a value judgement
- Money is something “tangible”
- “Is it worth it?”
Other designers and developers make money
Market for front-end dev resources?
- Never be able to prevent people from “stealing”
- Because of view source
Commercial front-end dev pioneers
FancyZoom by Panic
In a bit of an experiment: if your website is commercial (i.e. makes you money), you can license FancyZoom for $39 per site, a one-time fee.
Wijmo
Isotope
- jQuery plugin
- Animated filtering, sorting
- Intelligent layouts like Masonry
- Serious progressive enhancement
Product
- Still open-source
- Available on GitHub
- Adopt the FancyZoom license model
- One time licensing fee to use Isotope in all your commercial projects
Getting legit
- GitHub donation
- Flattr
- Generic PayPal donation button
- Donate to Modernizr
Metafizzy
👁 Metafizzy
- Proper legal entity
- Employers at my agency were okay with it
- Legitimate company
- What do companies do?
- Make money
Logistics
- Hooks into PayPal
- Customer makes purchase
- Customer receives an email with “product” attached
With Isotope
- All product (script, demos, documentation) is open-source, readily available
- No IP exchange
- Vapor-product?
%% Bermuda pic %%
%% Honor system book store %%
As a commercial enterprise
- Beholden to paying customers
- Can’t rely on Laissez-faire open-source attitude
- Sleazy?
- Going against the open-source ideal
All the pieces
- Product: Isotope
- Distrubution: Pulley App
- Legal: Metafizzy
- Opened at $37 a license, now at $25
Results
- Selling Isotope made up 25% income in 2011
- Able to pay off car loan and student loan
- Impact on quality of life
- At a cost of 20% of my working hours
Yay money
- People want to be invested in the products and services they enjoy
- Price allows non-technical users to contribute to the project
Commercializing front-end dev
- Not a silver bullet
- Are support emails bugging you?
- Think about it
Scott Robbin
Re-thinking role of front-end dev
- There is a huge market for commercial front-end dev
- Free & open-source ideal doesn’t scale
- Economic deficit
There is nothing wrong about making money off of honest work.
Thank you!
Leftover notes…
Offering Premium Support
- Priced at $17
- Customer gets to email me
- Those who needed support
- Competent developers figure it out
- Those who used support didn’t just need Isotope support
- They needed lower level help with JavaScript
How much is this worth?
- Isotope development took 12 hours a week, 3 months
- 14 weeks x 12 hours a weeks x $24 an hour
- $4,032 estimated
Pricing
- Isotope released at $37
- Fair price?
- iOS >$1 = ‘pricey’
- Dark Sky app
- But…
- Contract developer for this = $1,000’s
PayPal
- Not friendly across the globe
- Blocks IPs from some countries in the Mid-East
