Bookmarked

Takeaway: work constantly to create alliances with others

Bookmarked Open Source Tools From the Warren for President Tech Team (medium.com)

We are so grateful for the hundreds of thousands of Warren supporters who used our tools to help our grassroots movement: Thank you.

In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community. So today we’re taking the important step of open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use.

Our hope is that other Democratic candidates and progressive causes will use the ideas and code we developed to run stronger campaigns and help Democrats win.

The economics of open source development

Recently, I watched a video from JSConf.EU by CJ Silverio on the economics of open source development. She recounted the story of the start of Node.js and the Node Package Manager (NPM), and how the creator of Node.js gave the source code to the Node Foundation, but the creator of Node Package Manager retained all rights and created a company to continue development of NPM and took VC money. The video is a good watch, with lots of excellent examples on how business get value from open source software, but don’t (in general) pay anything for the software (either development or support costs). My additions to this video: (1) people who want to make money from the software they create should think hard about how they are going to do that before they start releasing that software, and (2) people who use open source for profit should invest some of their profits in keeping the wheels of progress turning (pay the developers something), otherwise the supply may dry up.