Paying It Forward / Paying It Back

As we’re on the eve of Apple’s annual little slice of “nerdvanah” that is WWDC, I’ve been thinking alot about what makes the Mac (and the iPhone/iPad) developer/development community so interesting.

At first blush there’s the inside baseball stuff from Gruber, Siracusa, and the other developers-turned-pundits; there’s the Twitter-banter between  ”super-star” developers like Matt Gemmell and Craig Hockenberry, and, then of course the Indie-developed apps that are more often than not spectacular in the care and thought that goes into them  (I mean, just to name a few,  look at DL, Coda and RadioShift on OSX  or The Elements, Alice, and Articles on the iPad, what’s not to love?).

But, at the end of the day that’s not really something I appreciate purely as a developer — the great execution of an app, that is — it’s more of a user thing.. by that, I mean great execution of an idea or a feature is something we experience though use… of course if we also understand how that feature was created that’s pretty nice too, and maybe we can hope to emulate some of that great UX in our own apps.

But, as developers I think that there’s something interesting and fundamental about this community (that a lot of us take for granted), and that is the extreme generosity of  Mac/iPhone developers.  Lots of development communities share code and techniques, but this community does it with an intensity and a committment to excellent design and usability that seems to me to be pretty rare.   Look at some of the code that’s available to you as a developer that both makes your products fundamentally better creations and shortens your development cycle by anywhere from hours to weeks…

In no particular order you, as a Mac or iPhone developer, have access to things like…

• Sparkle by Any Matuschak
• The Potion Store and Potion StoreFront by Andy Kim
• MGTwitterEngine and all sorts of other clever components by Matt Legend Gemmell
• Three20 by Joe Hewett
• A complete GUI enabled Mac and iPhoneOS Unit testing suite by Gabriel Handford
• Super useful iPhone UIKit utility classes by the guys over at Enormego
• BWToolKit (Great IB components) by Brandon Walkin
• M3InstallController by Martin Pilkington
• Cocos2d-iPhone by Ricardo Quesada

To say nothing of…

• Really deep Cocoa concepts and design patterns explained by Mike Ash, Marcus Zarra & Matt Long at Cocoa is My Girlfriend and Matt Gallagher at Cocoa with Love

..or..

• Dan Wood’s (Karelia Software)  Mac Indie Marketing Blog which is a must-read for anyone trying to make it on their own as an Indie Mac/iPhone developer.

This list goes on and on and on…

One of my primary goals in starting MacInde last year was to catalog and recognize all the tools that are available to Indie Mac/iPhone developers that can make your development life easier, faster, more efficient, etc. I’ll bet that if you tried to re-create all of the production quality code out there that we’re all using in our OSX and iPhoneOS apps thanks to this community, there’s probably 5-7 man-years of effort that you’d need to spend in doing it.

Most of these developers who have opened their code do so out of a sense of community, and to give back for the lessons they learned from others… some do it for the recognition of their peers or in the hope others will help improve or add-to what they’ve started.  But no mater why they put that code out there, you are probably making use of it in your apps.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we as a community decided to actually pay it forward by paying it back..?  What I mean is to reach out tangibly to these men and women –  share a bit in profits from your apps if you used someone else’s code to help you with your product…

It doesn’t have to be a zillion dollars, but if there’s a paypal tip jar on their site or on their BitBucket or GitHub page put something in it.  If you can, dedicate a small percentage of your app’s net profits to thank them for helping to make your project a success — maybe 2% of your 1st year’s profits up to $5,000… or whatever.

The point is that it’s great we can all avail ourselves of these great bits of code, useful tidbits and great insights/lessons  into the richness of OSX, Cocoa and CocoaTouch, but the tragedy of the commons (i.e. a freely available resource)  is that unless we all tend to its upkeep, that commons eventually gets depleted.  In the case of open source software we see it all the time, some great open source package is released, everyone loves it, but eventually it falls into disuse because in the real world software requires maintenance or it suffers from bit-rot.   And, in the real world maintaining software costs actual money (or time, which == money); everyone is willing to use the code when it benefits them, but very few give back.

You might well point out that things like Apache, Tomcat and Hapoop seem to be quite well maintained…  Well, Apache, Tomcat and Hadoop and many other high-value  open source packages have large corporations helping fund them — because it’s in their economic interest to do so.  Here in the Mac development community most developers are indie developers; they’re not getting corporate support… which is why you should consider helping out.

Of course, some indie devs are doing really, really well and probably don’t really need lots of support for their generously donated code, (though I doubt anyone would turn away a gracious “thank you” in the form of cash, tho’ I am sure a bunch would probably turn right back around donate it to a worthy charty) but many other developers could probably use the support.   Software engineering is really hard work — if writing beautiful code and making great applications people love were easy everyone would be doing it.  (yeah, yeah, it does seem sometimes that everyone is doing it… but as you know, they’re not.)

This has gotten long in the tooth, but I’d love to find a way to help promote the idea that the Mac/iPhone Indie Dev community is more that a bunch of islands of individuals and small teams toiling away in isolation with no more than the gossamer  threads of Internet connections tying us together.  We should find real tangible ways to keep all this generosity alive by ensuring the people who practice it can keep doing it.

Since I am pushing this idea, I’ll step up to the plate first.  I have a few iPhone and iPad apps coming out this summer/fall: I plan on donating 5% of my net profits for the 1st year, up to $5,000 per app to the indie developers whose code helped make my apps possible.  Where I use code from multiple developers, the proceeds will be split evenly between them.    I’ll announce my apps when they become available and also announce what code I’ve been the beneficiary of, how much I am paying out on a regular basis (probably per quarter given the wonky way Apple pays developers for sales) and people can feel free to see if I’ve walked the walk…

So,  that’s what I am thinking about here on this WWDC-eve.. what do you think?  Anyone else care to join me..?