If I think of starting a business around something, I also think, is this the business I would start if my aim was to succeed by making money?
I voted that my company will pay £0 for a maintained Elm, because I don’t think it is the best way to manage things for the benefit of all.
My reasons are:
- I feel slightly demotivated to contribute to Elm, pureley out of love for it, knowing that a business that doesn’t give freely back to me is consuming it for profit (if you are so lucky, I don’t think you will make money anyway).
AND
- Such a business would inevitably act in its own interests, whilst wielding influence over something that matters to me.
I don’t in any way disagree with businesses making money from Elm (if they can) from the position of being a more neutrally oriented third party, not one that controls its future maintenance and direction.
I think contributing to Elm as a package author has thus far been very rewarding. In addition to really enjoying writing those packages, I also know I have greatly multiplied the effort in what I receive back. That kind of positive cycle is what I would most want to retain about it. I also think it is the way that is most beneficial to all.
I think we are slowly working towards a fork, but I don’t see it as urgent or the next thing that should happen, since there is still a lot of scope to make improvements before that really needs to happen.
An idea I have put forward before is that a fork of it could become an Apache Foundation incubator project. That has some potential advanges:
- Apache has been around a good while and is generally well respected.
- They can provide hosting resources.
- It can help with getting corporate sponsorship and act as a conduit for funding.
- They are experienced at mentoring open source projects.
- It helps to establish a good governance model for the long term management of a project.
- Bus factor has to be resolved before a project can graduate from the incubator - all top-level Apache projects have multiple contributors.