The Story of Spaz: How to Give Away Everything, Make No Money, and Still Win
*Excerpt
What motivates us as developers? How do we define success? Throughout the development of Spaz, we've learned a lot about what works, what doesn't, and what really matters. Come to hear the story, and participate in the discussion of how we define success in open source.
Description
Spaz is a mature, open source, free desktop and mobile client for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Palm webOS. Started in Spring of 2007, Spaz is one of the oldest Twitter clients available still under active development. Other systems have gone on to great commercial and popular success, but Spaz still continues to plug along, driven by a commitment to open standards, transparency, and community.
This talk will cover the history of Spaz’s development, from early successes and awards, to competition from well-funded closed source projects, to the transition onto mobile, and finding a sustainable niche where it continues to grow.
Specific topics we’ll cover include:
- Changing how you measure success
- Ignoring what everyone tells you about being successful
- Doing it for love, not money
- How one user can be more important than 100,000 downloads
- What to expect when you open your code
- Getting others involved in your project
- Creating a codebase for multiple platforms and systems
- Being open on a closed platform
Tags
happiness, spaz, twitter, microblogging, Development, funding, mobile, javascript, transparency
Speaker
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Edward Finkler
Funkatron Productions- Website: http://funkatron.com/
- Twitter: funkatron
- Identi.ca: funkatron
- Favorites: View Edward's favorites
Biography
Ed Finkler is a PHP and JavaScript developer at HiiDef. He is the creator of the PHPSecInfo auditing tool and the Inspekt input filtering library for PHP. Ed is also an experienced JavaScript developer, and his application Spaz won “Best Community HTML Application” in the 2007 Adobe AIR Developer Derby. His work in web runtime platforms on the desktop and mobile currently occupies most of his free time.
Sessions
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- Title: The Story of Spaz: How to Give Away Everything, Make No Money, and Still Win
- Track: Business
- Room: Steel
- Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
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Excerpt:
What motivates us as developers? How do we define success? Throughout the development of Spaz, we’ve learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t, and what really matters. Come to hear the story, and participate in the discussion of how we define success in open source.
- Speakers: Edward Finkler