I’m offering free consulting for sustaining open source projects

October 26th, 2023

Starting today I will offer to help any open source project that is looking to raise funds and find a sustainable business model. Totally free (as in free beer). I’ve been working full-time on open source independently for 5+ years, totally self-funded (no corporate sponsors or employers). I think I can help. If not, I have a money-back guarantee. Elegibility: To apply visit https://forms.gle/WKpfPfkjFUrVNksF8 What’s the catch? There’s no catch. I want to see open source developers thrive. Notice how […]

The YAML Document From Hell

November 7th, 2023

For a data format, yaml is extremely complicated. It aims to be a human-friendly format, but in striving for that it introduces so much complexity, that I would argue it achieves the opposite result. Yaml is full of footguns and its friendliness is deceptive. In this post I want to demonstrate this through an example. Ruud van Asseldonk https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

You can’t trust proprietary software

September 14th, 2023

Unity announced pricing changes and a new runtime fee, which is already causing tremendous backlash. This is a reminder that you cannot trust proprietary software and that your business is tied to the whims of the company behind it. Why take such risk? Game developers should consider Godot for their next project.

Cloud Hosted WebODM

September 13th, 2023

Done! WebODM is now available as a turn-key web application from https://webodm.net. It took only 7 years. But why did it take so long? Back in August 2016 when I started designing the ideas around what would be then called WebODM, I never had a doubt that 1) It should be a web application and 2) A SaaS/open-source model would help sustain it’s continued development. It’s only after the first iterations of the software came to completion that I realized […]

FOSS Funding – Chapter 3 – Trickle Down Sustainability

August 15th, 2023

While trickle down economics doesn’t work, “trickle down sustainability” as it’s applied to free and open-source software is a concept that might just work. It’s not a silver bullet and will not solve the problem of FOSS funding once and for all. But as with most problems, we’re not trying to get from A to Z, but from A to B. A step forward in the right direction. What’s the idea? Why frontend software? Because this is what users see, […]

FOSS Funding – Chapter 2 – Binaries

February 1st, 2023

We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html In Chapter 1 we talked about one of the core challenges around FOSS monetization: open source licenses allow anyone to freely distribute copies of it. If a person starts charging money for it, without any additional benefit (e.g. enterprise support), somebody else will come along and redistribute it for free. This is why selling enterprise support has been a successful model for many […]

FOSS Funding – Chapter 1 – Open source has a funding problem

December 14th, 2022

This is the first post of a series about funding free and open source software. The fact that lots of open source software is largely underfunded is well documented. Many successful open source projects are successful because they stand on the shoulders of giants who absorb the cost of running it. A few reach world-wide success through adoption and find ways to sustain themselves via corporate/individual sponsorships. Ok great; but what about you? Say you have a project. It’s open-source. […]

Greed Phase of Crypto

May 1st, 2021

Seems like the crypto world is at it again! I blogged briefly about the denial phase of crypto back in 2018. The valuations went back to more “normal” levels after that post, but after a period of consolidation, it seems like we’re at it again. Has something changed in the technology? From a usability perspective, not a whole lot, really. Most crypto currencies are still just not really good at replacing fiat transactions. VISA and PayPal and a few others […]

Right To Repair

October 6th, 2020

I sincerely look forward to see more states and countries bringing forward right to repair laws. If you bought something, you should own it. I didn’t realize how bad this has gotten, until I tried to replace the batteries on both my Kindle and Google Pixel. It’s clear these people DO NOT want you to open these things up. My god. Took me a good hour to change the Kindle battery. Took me FOUR hours to pry open the Google […]

Hello, UAV4GEO

December 31st, 2019

Drone mapping has been the focus of my work for the past few years. For 2020 I’m planning to increase this focus with the development of DroneDB, which I have hopes will replace the (clunky) workflows around aerial data management. For this reason I’ve adopted a new name for all drone tech related business activities (and hopefully put an end on the “how do you spell Masserano?”). Say hello to UAV4GEO. Website: https://uav4geo.com

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