With Assembly (YC W12), anyone can contribute to open-source and get paid

http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/21/7258667/assembly-collaborative-work-open-source

by awwstn • 12 years ago

93 22 12 years ago

bitsweet2• 12 years ago

Today we announced $2.9MM in funding from Union Square Ventures, Thrive, Collaborative Fund, and others. We're eager to get back to work.

Happy to answer questions.

debacle5• 12 years ago

Why do the ownership shares of a project never seem to add up to the total bounties for that project?

It seems like many users are creating bounties for projects that they work on and then fulfilling those same bounties.

Most projects also have a single user with over 90% of the ownership of a project. While that mirrors how many OSS projects are structured, it doesn't really favor the "collaborative" message of Assembly. Are you doing anything to adjust that, or is it something that is fine in your minds?

If an OSS project gains traction, it generally becomes a PaaS solution with 3-5 major providers and many smaller providers. How in the world can Assembly hope to promise people revenue with that model?

bitsweet2• 12 years ago

Why do the ownership shares of a project never seem to add up to the total bounties for that project?

Open bounties represent new ownership potential. Transparency is important here - it is one reason why ownership is on the blockchain, this allows it to be verifiable outside of Assembly.

It seems like many users are creating bounties for projects that they work on and then fulfilling those same bounties.

All new ownership in a product is earned through the same mechanism. This makes progress transparent and participation fair.

Most projects also have a single user with over 90% of the ownership of a project. While that mirrors how many OSS projects are structured, it doesn't really favor the "collaborative" message of Assembly. Are you doing anything to adjust that, or is it something that is fine in your minds?

Active products rarely have owners with anything close to 90%. Some products may be skewed to an individual that's done a lion share of work initially, but there are many others that are more spread out or become so with time. Opposed to completely working alone, having others to bounce ideas or make other contributions that complement your skills is what Assembly community members find collaborative.

If an OSS project gains traction, it generally becomes a PaaS solution with 3-5 major providers and many smaller providers. How in the world can Assembly hope to promise people revenue with that model?

It's challenging to compare Assembly products to traditional open source projects & libraries. The Assembly community is building real products, they just happen to have source code that is open source and participation is open, transparent, and collaborative. To clarify, Assembly does not promise a product will earn revenue...only that if any profit is generated, it will be distributed to the contributors. Assembly is already distributing proceeds from revenue producing products, some members are earning over $1000 a month for previous contributions. This aligns Assembly's success with our community.

khc• 12 years ago

What does open source mean in this context? From the article it sounds like a contracting platform, and nothing related to open source.

alain94040• 12 years ago

Congratulations on the fundraising. 6 years ago, with pretty much the same pitch, no investor gave us the time of day (to be fair, we did get to be selected for TechCrunch's conference).

Let's just say we learned a lot afterwards, so good luck to you. Great if you can pull it off. Just don't fake it for too long :-)

Our story: http://www.cnet.com/news/fairsoftware-virtualizes-startups/

mamcx• 12 years ago

Something that confuse me.

Looking at https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web and other repos, look like all the open source activity must be inside assembly. That presume everyone want to be part of it, and that everyone look for financial gains.

Is possible to accept contributions in the normal sense, and only have inside assembly the "core team" or only the members that are part of the financial-side of the project?

debacle5• 12 years ago

Assembly's website has an incredibly beautiful design.

But it's atrocious to use. 50% of the page is wasted in whitespace, another 30-40% in boilerplate and the use of the site is not intuitive. My cursor will change to a pointer when things aren't actually clickable and trying to use the slider causes text on the page to be selected.

Onto the actual application, it's impossible to determine how value is assigned, what a vote is, why I can vote if I'm logged out, what that means, etc.

This is a tool designed to be primarily used by smart, relatively technical people with copy and design directed towards your average Facebook user.

Edit: As a final note, your FAQ is 10 pages and almost 100 questions long. This creates a huge barrier to entry for new users. Many of those questions only exist due to inefficiencies in your UI. It's very daunting, and honestly I would never use this product for its intended purpose at this point.

chrislloyd• 12 years ago

Hey debacle! I'm a front-end engineer at Assembly. We've pushed out a bunch of new features in the last couple of days and are still ironing out the edges. Namely, we shift from Kickstarter-style "product" pages (with even more boilerplate) to using feeds to help expose more content. The large header is going to be revisited pretty quickly as we unify the different sections on a product. I've created a Meta bounty with your feedback so you can follow our progress addressing it: https://assembly.com/meta/bounties/834

debacle5• 12 years ago

I signed up (ack) and replied with some of the UI bugs/issues that I found.

jonaldomo2• 12 years ago

For each project listed, are 100% of profits distributed through app coins? Or does the owner of the project decide what percent of profits to share with the assembly community. It would be nice to see what this percentage is.

awwstn2• 12 years ago

Yes – 100% of profits are distributed to the community based on App Coins. The person who initially submits the product has ownership just like everyone else, and gets paid that way.

jonaldomo2• 12 years ago

I think its a cool idea, I am just thinking about how to prevent from getting taken advantage of. Couldn't the project owner up his earning package as the business gets successful which in turn decreases profit that would be paid out?

(Thanks for the 689 coins just now!)

debacle5• 12 years ago

https://assembly.com/help/revenue#how-do-i-earn-income-from-...

Notable, from the next question:

Additionally, most products have “tip contract.” The default tip contract is that 5% of all new coins are tipped to the Core Team, and 5% are tipped to the bounty author.

jj00• 12 years ago

So what if the Open Source project doesn't make any money? Do they expect the project to pay percentages based on donations or something?

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

They will pay the percentages based on the money made, 50% of zero is zero.

mbesto• 12 years ago

I just recently joined. I think this is a HUGE opportunity specifically for people who are looking to get experience with building real software projects and shipping code. (i.e. juniors) Good luck to you guys...I might be helping out on some projects in the near future.

My only critique is if this things scales to become big, it means people will increasingly try to game the system (i.e. figure out how maximize returns by illegitimate means). Money motivations do funny things to people.

ChaoticGood• 12 years ago

I love this! I think in the future we will be focused more on bidding on a plethora of tasks the market has to offer. Assembly so far is the closest thing to that future. I also like https://worklist.net/ The idea that I can fill my day with a variety of new and compelling tasks sounds more awesome than getting stuck in a routine. Sounds like a great way for a junior developer such as myself to gain vital experience.

userbinator• 12 years ago

The first thing I think of when I see the name is the demoparty ( http://www.assembly.org ). I suppose Compile would be a good name too...

derekp7• 12 years ago

Let's say I have an open source project. And people start contacting me about purchasing paid support. Now I currently have a day job, and the total paid support contracts wouldn't be enough to quit and support the project full time. What I'm looking for is a company that I can contract with to provide that support, with a portion of the proceeds going to the open source project in return for making that company the primary support channel.

Would Assembly be able to provide this type of service, or is there another one out there that does this already, that I'm not aware of?

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

I think Assembly is a really cool idea - however, I've noticed a few things that are driving me away from the platform.

#1. Lack of good ideas. Most of the ideas are rather unmotivational to me. I realize that this could be an entirely personal hangup, so I don't hold this against the platform.

#2. Lack of good leadership. After participating in discussions with a few of the project leads, and reading the content posted by others, it looks like few (if any) of the people starting projects there have any idea how building a product works. See "Voices" for an example. It's tough to get behind some of these people.

That said, Assembly could be a really powerful platform. Just waiting for the right idea to come along I guess...

With Assembly (YC W12), anyone can contribute to open-source and get paid

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