For those not a part of the Django community: Toastdriven is not new, Daniel Lindsley is a staple for us. Haystack and Tastypie on their own are wonderful projects with untold hours of unpaid OSS. This is more of a full-stack project than either of those, but I have a huge amount of faith in their ability to execute, given the time required. I would much rather see them working on OSS than consulting, it's better for everybody (except maybe clients who can't have them exclusively)
Just so it's clear, I don't question the sincerity, stature or trustworthiness of these guys. They come across well in their video. My lines of thought are about the project, not them personally.
What I find confusing is why a big upfront investment is necessary merely to start the project and, perhaps more importantly, why it wouldn't be a true open source project and only open sourced at the end. Why not open source what they have already and see if it sells itself by attracting collaborators?
It's not clear from the page or the video if they've open sourced the work done on the prototype already, but if they have and people are already playing with it and seeing promise, it becomes a much easier sell. Many good open source projects got significant sponsorship or raised money for people to work on them after initially proving itself, and that's great.
Your concerns are valid. It costs nothing but a few minutes to start an open source project. Projects of this scope, however, do benefit from some amount of early design and planning. After reading PHK's recent rant [1], and reflecting on Brooks's idea of "surgical teams" [2], I wonder if some initial work in isolation is such a bad thing.
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
A response from the people running the project leads me to believe this is true. Essentially it seems they're seeking funding for their product but the open sourcing of the project is a big cherry on top (rather than it being purely an "open source project").
