[mfts0]

The vision for the v1 is spot on. There were some attempts to turn the open source ecosystem into a creator economy - they are so similar but…

The big BUT is that software needs to be maintained whereas a video once uploaded on YouTube doesn‘t need to be edited again.

I have a feeling that Birk and the Polar team have the right insights to build the right tools to serve the specific needs of open-source software maintainers.

[birk]

Hey, Birk here (founder of Polar). Thank you so much @patrick91 for sharing our post here and thank you @mfts0 for the kind words.

Completely agree. I believe open source – as one of the largest and most important ecosystems in the world – is deserving of having a thriving "creator economy". Combined with it being a win-win for the users (businesses and individuals).

But such a platform needs to be bespoke for open source and its nuances vs. focused on content creation. It can't be a silver bullet solution either. All projects are different. So with Polar, we aim to build out a suite of all the possible value-add offerings, but allow maintainers to experiment, tweak and adapt to make it fit their initiatives and communities.

We have our work cut out for us. It's going to be insanely hard and fixing funding is the holy grail, but it's an important mission to pursue and I'm convinced a creator economy will form since current models are not beneficial to anyone. Just a matter of who & how. That's why I think it's crucial we're building it open source ourselves to truly build in public and serve maintainers through quick iterations and based on their needs, what's working etc. Fun times :-)