Interesting to see this here, I had this idea a while back and have been discussing it with people before I go on validating/invalidating it.
In my mind anyway, the idea is something like https://railslts.com/ but for potentially every other gem in your gemfile. We would provide security patches, bugfixes, features, documentation, training, version upgrade scripts/documentation and so on to subscribers.
I really like the accumulated credit for features, maybe a system of like: request feature, we put a "credit" value on the complexity of the feature, then companies/people can pledge credits/money for it would work?
I've also had this on my mind for quite some time.
How would you actually implement things though? After all, you're essentially trying to sell "support contracts" for open source projects via the platform. You could implement these by a) "hiring" the project owner to work on specific bugs/features or b) hiring freelancers to fix requested bugs.
Furthermore, how would you ...
* determine the value of bugs/features?
* react to a project owner abandoning a project?
* handle multiple upstream developers?
I hadn't really cracked how to scale the business up, but to bootstrap it I was thinking that I would just do the work until it became too overwhelming. I haven't thought about what pricing would look like, so I don't know how feasible it would be to just hire more people as more and more work comes in - but it should have some interesting economies of scale since there is a lot of overlap in the gems used in rails projects for instance.
One important part as a provider would be to have a way to collect all the dependencies on which a customer depends on. This helps you priorities your maintenance work if the customer doesn't have any requests (auto-pilot mode). Is is also useful as way to sell: "see all the things you depend on". And finally it lets you take decisions on which project maintainer to poach.
In my mind anyway, the idea is something like https://railslts.com/ but for potentially every other gem in your gemfile. We would provide security patches, bugfixes, features, documentation, training, version upgrade scripts/documentation and so on to subscribers.
I really like the accumulated credit for features, maybe a system of like: request feature, we put a "credit" value on the complexity of the feature, then companies/people can pledge credits/money for it would work?