Bridging the gap

Why FundRequest bridges the gap between ZERO or Enterprise Support for open source products

Open source software has never been as popular and widely adopted by enterprises as it is today and with the rise of Ethereum and blockchain technology the landscape has changed yet again. At FundRequest, we are moving one step further by supporting open source development with enhanced decentralised funding.

With FundRequest, we offer the users of open source communities the ability to fund open issues on any project and to reward the people that are contributing their free time and effort to support open source software. Both open source and blockchain technology is here to stay and FundRequest aims to provide premium support at a low cost.

Flexible support strategy

Businesses who run open source software in production, are faced with a choice. Keep using the open source version as they do in development, but lack support, or switch to an Enterprise version and pay for Enterprise support. Black or white, one or the other.

Flexible — ˈflɛksɪb(ə)l/ — ”able to be easily modified to respond to altered circumstances.”

FundRequest provides a third alternative. Individuals, SMEs and enterprises only pay for the issues or questions they want to see resolved. The platform allows users to add funds to issues and to communicate them directly to the open source community. Developers within the community who provide solutions are rewarded for their contributions.

Meaning enterprises would spend their support budget only on issues they actually face.

This approach allows companies to implement a low cost and flexible support strategy tailored to their budget and needs.

Strength in numbers

Multiple users can add funds to existing issues or questions which increases the reward and thus the incentive for developers to fix the problem. This does not only apply to bugs. Also new features or integrations can be handled in the same way.

Reinventing the wheel?

Others have tried and booked limited success. The reason for their poor results is that they tried to reinvent the wheel.

“In order to add funds or bounty to an issue we first need to build a system that can track issues.“

True, in order to be able to add funds to a ticket, once must be aware of the existence of those tickets.

“So we build a platform where users can browse the tickets and add funds to them.”

False, it is at this point where the wheel is being reinvented. There are already several very successful issue tracking platforms out there. The last thing you want, is to position your product as a competitor. Instead you should integrate with those platforms and try to grow with them.

Integration doesn’t mean ‘stealing’, it doesn’t mean getting data and publishing it on your website. When we talk about integration we mean seamlessly. We don’t want to ‘steal’ users away for their favourite platform, on the contrary, because we add additional functionality, we want to see those platforms grow even more.

The first platform FundRequest will integrate with is GitHub, the leading online Git repository hosting service, with more then 19.4 million active repositories, 10.7 million active issues and over 5.8 million active users, where “active” means code committed, a comment created, a repository starred, or an issue opened (source).