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A New Non-Money Oriented Crowdsourcing Platform Based On Code Contributions (crowdsourcer.io)
An anonymous reader shares a new crowdfunding site built on open source principles to "remove the money element from project creation" so creators "don't have to take extreme actions such as quitting their jobs or compromising on their ideas because of investor demands. Because of the nature of crowdsourcer.io projects, project creators can remain as ambitious as funded projects and get all the contributors they need to make their idea a reality."
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Market standards.
When I wrote my first released software, a good idea and a few hundred lines of code would be sufficient to get a customer base, because the odds were good that it was a unique new tool that helped somebody.
Now, to even get customers to try a product, it has to have a good website, professionally-designed interface, and be significantly better in some way than the dozen other equivalent tools available. All of that polish takes time, and if you're working on a spare-time basis, that means it takes a scale of years to produce a viable product. During that time, technology still changes, and that promising library that saved so much time is now obsolete and considered a security risk. Updating the product is possible, but it takes more time, and that means more risk. Finally, when the product is viable, it has to compete with an offering from a bigger company with an established revenue stream.
I don't mean to imply that it's impossible to succeed with spare-time projects, but it is more difficult now than even ten years ago. Software has moved from being a few amusements and office tools to a mature industry driving the majority of our civilization. There's competition out there for most of the current generation of ideas, where there simply wasn't before.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Asking people to donate their time and efforts in lieu of pay is called a charity.
At the end of the day, your donated efforts will line someone's pocket. You're either cool with that or you're not, but enough of the Millennial-flavored marketing bullshit trying to label this as crowd-something simply because it involves more than one human.