UberHacker

[jbenet]

At some point the tipping point will be passed and talented open source hackers will be able to solve costly problems for orgs without having to take employment there. Something is going to reduce the massive friction between orgs that want to have working code, and freelance/open source hackers who don't want to go work at those companies full time.

Consider this story:

Open Source hacker Foo wants to work on whatever she wants to, but still needs to it. She needs to make money somehow, so she sometimes contracts out. She uses things like Bountysource or Gittip, but she doesn't really make rent.

Organization Bar wants to solve problem X, which is not even core to their business but needs to get done. In fact, solving problem X right might even be a good module to publish in open source, so others have it solved. Bar would love to contribute back to the commons. They don't even care about owning the code-- they would be fine with it being Open Source (maybe even the glue that touches private code). But most contractors they try out never get much done, and it's a huge legal hassle.

Foo and Bar should be able to happily + frictionlessly transact ($, code).

Perhaps what till make this all work is a platform that works hard to evaluate and promote developers + route inbound requests to them, of specific problems. Think of it like Uber, instead of being distributed over the world's surface, the UberCoders are distributed across knowledge + problem domains. (is Athena a prereq? prob not. prob can just parse github). The router org would find the right person that wants to work on that, that can either solve the problem, or solve it conceptually and provide recommendations/program sketches. The org would facilitate negotiation of both ends and source the markets. And serve as the legal contracting company, so it can be super easy (like paying for uber) across the world. It's important that the devs (and clients) can specify all sorts of constraints (like, will ONLY develop MIT/BSD2 code, or in particular languages, with particular tools, etc. Nobody worth their salt wants to work with crap, or with draconian licenses).

[sesam]

codeable.io does this specifically for Wordpress hackers.

[bnvk]

I find this exact problem to be really interesting. The closet thing I have seen towards this is HackHands which had a very nifty Jabber bot that would ping you when a new task matching your skillset went live. The jobs posted are usually a bit more significant than BountySource

I've also been thinking along these lines quite a bit not just in terms of libraries and code specific infrastructure, but in terms of end-user facing open source software (operating systems, window managers, and apps) as all of these things have a design / UX component that is traditionally lacking in FOSS tools!

[craigiansmith]

Dude! I reckon that IPFS is fully kosher! You should totally go ahead with all your wildest ambitions and just let the chips fall where they might.

[Puso90]

web3 $HUNT is probably looking to go somehow in this direction