Priority support services for free and open source applications
This proposal is for an open source web application designed to enable maintainers of open source projects to accept priority support requests from businesses.
The foundation of the internet and modern day technology is built on the back of free and open source software.
Large corporations are seeing the value of how open sourcing their software can fuel the services they provide, even in the wake of the explosion of subscription-based profit models.
Imagine a future where developers could easially create and maintain the open source projects as a profitable source of income. There is no telling what kinds of technologies could emerge because of this. This project aims to make it as easy to do this as creating a GitHub account.
FOSS Priority Support is a self-hostable web application designed to facilitate an easy relationship between open source projects and the businesses that depend on them. The goal of this project is to make it profitable for successful open source projects to be actively maintained and developed.
This feature allows businesses to subscribe to a monthly service that guarantees that a maintainer will be available to help them with a problem if one arises.
This feature allows businesses to sponsor an open source project and to view metrics such as their logo visibility and to receive details about how their sponsorship has benefited the project.
This feature allows businesses to negotiate with open source project maintainers to come to an agreement on the cost and terms of paid changes and improvements to the software.
In addition, a review and rating system is provided so that the work done can be publicly rated and reviewed. This is designed to encourage transparency and to help other businesses to make a decision regarding contract work in the future.
The system will provide sign in options using GitHub.
Easy linking to tickets in the #issue_number format will be available.
This project is purely a proposal at this point. Feedback and suggestions are highly encouraged and greatly appreciated. It is sincerely hoped that this project can become a resource of great value to the numerous quantity of fantastic open source projects and their maintainers that are out there.