That's exactly what Assembly does (https://assemblymade.com/ideas). We enable everyone to openly collaborate on real products and then share the upside. Every month there is revenue Assembly transparently pays the bills and splits the remaining proceeds with everyone that built the app.
disclosure: one of the founders of Assembly
Re:The Great Code Club
by mjmahone17 on Tuesday January 28, 2014 @01:47AM
(#7135734)
I've gone through the site, and am curious about your business model. Essentially, you are creating co-op apps: how much of a cut of that app goes to the assembly team? Is it 50%, with you taking control of selling the app/making the business decisions? Or is the stake constantly changing (i.e. I contributed early, but my share gets diluted as more people work on more tasks to continue making revenue?), and you at some point want to sell the app?
Great questions - this FAQ page should hopefully answer all of them: https://assemblymade.com/help/profits
well this just popped across my desk... nice. pretty similar to our Geeklist hackathon/projects/ideas app rolling out of our hackathon app at (http://geekli.st/hackathon) only it is all free. we don't take any cut. we provide all the infrastructure. Apps that get built that gain traction our Geeklist Labs will help get funded - if they want. No contracts, no fees for the app. 100% open source collaboration for ideas and projects. Spurring innovation globally at Geeklist. disclosure: I founded Geeklist. - r - oh and hack4good (http://hack4good.geekli.st)
> So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?
There was something posted on here a while back called AssemblyMade. They basically do crowd-sourced development. To my knowledge, ideas are voted on, and then people essentially work in a democratic environment iterating on the development. In the end, the idea is that any profits made from the project will be split.
It really would be. I was hoping that this "coding club" would do something like what you described, but it seems to be more of a pay-for-learning approach.
There's a subreddit called "progether" ("programming together") that tries to organize people for collaborating on a series of small projects and coming up with new ideas together: http://www.reddit.com/r/progether/ + http://www.reddit.com/r/progether/wiki/about
It doesn't seem wildly successful, but it's a nice effort, and I heard about it via a computer science student who found it interesting to participate in.
So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?
E.g., an open-source iTunes integrated with bittorrent, complete with iPhone app. A font-design program for amateurs. A keyframed animation tool that outputs to HTML5 canvas. A dynamic texture generator program. A user-friendly neural net trainer. A new lossy image compression format and encoder/decoder designed for resolution independence instead of a fixed pixel grid. I don't know, just cool projects that get people really excited.
I mean, the logistics of organizing such a thing would be a little crazy, since not every type of project is amenable to a large number of developers working in parallel, and you'd need a kind of domain expert and lead architect on each one. But it would be so, so cool...