Re: Open Source Developer Exchange (Business Model)

One of the things you're touting as a reason to hire Solutionstap is
that your organization can provide quality control over the services
offered by its members.

Yet your Web site is offering memberships to the first 500 people who
walk through the door, so to speak, all because they are the first ones
to know about the site through the email lists you've posted on.  If I
fill out your forms and declare myself to be a J2EE wizard, how long
will it take (and how much will your customers spend on my services)
before you find out I'm actually not so good?  Of course, you can check
my resume or ask for some kind of certification, but employers can do
the same thing before they hire me directly with just as little effort.

One of the benefits of membership, according to your site, is that you
have a fund to support projects.  This is very nice, of course, if the
profits of *other* people's work is skimmed to allow *me* to work on
*my* favorite open-source project.  However, I would be a little bit
concerned that profits from *my* work are skimmed to allow *other
people* -- possibly people who are not as good at programming as myself,
see above -- to work on *their* favorite projects.

I can't find anything here on your site that addresses the many
critiques presented on this list by people with far more programming and
business experience than myself.  However, I could find hundreds of
words describing why it was a good idea for Solutionstap to incorporate
in Bermuda.

(By contrast, when I went to the home page of Wipro Technologies, an
Indian IT outsourcing firm, the first thing I saw was a testimonial
about how Thames Water reduced its IT support costs by 20% by using
Wipro.)

-- 
"It always amazes me that people whose profession is computation never
bother to get a little tiny bit of data and actually _do_ some."
  --Stephen J. Turnbull
// seth gordon // [email protected] // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //