Open Company: what advice would you give?

Question

Alexander Stigsen, author of E Text Editor is starting an ambitious project - called Open Company - in an attempt to combine the culture of open source software, with the remuneration of commercial.

Read the blog post announcing Open Company.

Like I say, it's ambitious, but laudable, I am sure you'll agree.

My question to the community is: what advice would you give? I think it would be interesting to get a feel for what the burning issues and pitfalls are. Also, suggested reading, resources and research could be useful. I've already suggested reading Producing Open Source Software.

Edit: there has been some debate as to whether the code of E Text Editor will be open source or not. To answer that, yes it will be open to everyone to download and modify, thus it will be open source. But it will also still be copyright and the product itself will not be freely distributable, so thus it will not be "Open Source" as defined by the OSI.

Update: The source is now available on Github, if you're interested.

Answer 1

One obvious pitfall is, since real money is involved, gaming the trust system offers potentially much higher benefits, and is more likely because of it.

Answer 2

The hurdle is developing this so called trust metrics system. When money is involved you can't have bugs so it's imperative it's perfect. If a bug was to be found and say; someone got a greater share of the money because of it, the contributors would leave and the project would instantly die.

So the first bit of advice is to heavily invest in this trust metrics system.

Also, someone mentioned this in the blog. It'll have to be constantly tweaked and kept up to date as times change.

Also, this is not open-source so why you've tagged it in your main post is beyond me. This is shared source which is totally different. Microsoft have a shared source program, similar to what Alex is proposing except people have to sign an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) and only report bugs. Maybe Alex can research what Microsoft have done and take some tips away from that.

I really hope it works for the sake Alex and his company because he has a lot of eyes watching him at the moment and if he's successful I can see an explosion of open companies which can only be a good thing.

Answer 3

First, let me say that I think this is a great idea and I applaud Alex for taking a leap. I just started to use e and I love it. I hope I can contribute somehow to this 'experiment' to help it become a success.

That being said, here's some of my concerns:

Like most people, I also think the Trust Metric system will be the hardest part of this. Not only because people will try to game the system, but also because people will want to know how much money the company is getting, how much the 'operating costs' are and how much they are entitled to. Not having complete transparency will probably lead to a number of people thinking that they are not getting their 'fair share'.

Also, I don't understand how the work gets assigned. Are there project managers? Do they get rated the same way? In fact, there are lots of different roles in a normal software project, are they all rated the same way?

The trust metric will also need to be normalized somehow. For example, Person 1 implements a widely wanted feature. Person 2 implements something the user doesn't see, but was necessary. In that scenario, I would think that Person 1 would get rated higher because more people knew about that person's work. How do those even out when the work is of the same quality?