Open-source ain’t free

I’m David DeSandro

• @desandro
• Follow along: bit.ly/openaintfree
• Designer at Twitter
• fqa

Today’s subject(s)

• Time
• Scarcity of resources
• Economics

View source

• Like breathing, an invisible act
• Essential learning tool
• Universally available

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

• First released in 2008
• Linked by Andy Clarke

• Linked by Cameron Moll

• Fireballed

• Percolates in the web community
• Picked up by WordPress themes
• …then Tumblr Themes
• Becomes part of the visual language of the web
• Pinterest

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.

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

• iOS App Store
• WordPress premium themes
• Expression Engine Commercial Add-ons
• Icon packs like Geomicons and Pictos
• Kickstarter campaigns

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

• Plugins by Nick Stakenburg
• Shadowbox.js
• Impact JS Game Engine
• View.js by Rogie King

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

• Proper legal entity
• Employers at my agency were okay with it
• Legitimate company
• What do companies do?
• Make money

Logistics

• Pulley App by Big Cartel

• 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