A plan for open source software maintainers
A few years ago I built a site addressed to this problem.  I had seen BountySource, but thought they didn&#x27;t have the right system, so decided to take a crack at it myself.  The site was pretty rough, but even so, I was surprised when my &quot;Show HN&quot; posts about it drew nothing but crickets.  Subsequent attempts to stimulate discussion on the topic here, by posting on the related threads that pop up from time to time, were also pretty much failures.  I lost interest, shut the site down, and moved on.<p>So Colin, I think you&#x27;re doing the right thing by soliciting feedback before you try to build anything.  This seems like a real problem, and one that should have a solution, but somehow there just aren&#x27;t as many people who want to make a living as independent open source developers as one might think.<p>It&#x27;s true I didn&#x27;t do much evangelizing.  As I think is mentioned somewhere on the YC site, two-sided marketplaces, which is what this is, are especially difficult to get going, so it&#x27;s not surprising that a half-hearted effort wouldn&#x27;t have gotten me far.  Anyway, I&#x27;m not absolutely convinced that, with far more effort than I put into it, I couldn&#x27;t have turned this into a viable lifestyle business.  But it did seem clear that at the very least, I had not hit a nerve.<p>Edit: clarity