If SAFE is open source why is MaidSafe building it?

Sounds like a stupid question I know but it just seems to me MaidSafes problems seem to all be about not having enough of the critical development resources to build this thing in due course. Why not release everything to the community and let the community build it in a true open source fashion.

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Anybody can go on Github to see all the code and anybody can contribute.

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And how many people are contributing? And how many of those are not employed by MaidSafe?

Even Bitcoin started as the project of one person. Maidsafe’s ultimate goal is to pass the baton as the role of primary developer​ to the community.

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Sure but I dont see them here is my point:

Might be worth a read @nicklambert How To Get Thousands of Stars on Your Github Project | by Richard Kim | cw Richard Kim

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And this answers your OP. If Maidsafe stepped aside and left it to the community then progress would slow down to “part time” work and crawl. This is because people can only contribute to the code base as their abilities and finances allow… As many people as want to can contribute to the development of the SAFE code right now.

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Many thanks for this @goindeep. It is also worth noting that @lightyear successfully applied to Mozilla’s mentorship program focussed on making open source project more accessible to contributors. I believe this is just about to start. We also have our CEP and code bounty programs and while those have admittedly not been a focus of late they are both mechanisms that we will draw on in future.

What we have found is that a tension exists between really opening things up to third party contributors and development speed. Naturally developers that are new to the code take quite a bit longer to get up to speed and we require the resource to aid that process. It’s kind of like having a lot of new starts all join the company at once with a varying levels of commitment and skill level. So in the near term, we think everyone’s interests are best served by going as fast as possible on network roll out, while we look at strategic third party involvement in tandem. We are still very much looking to decentralise the managament and maintenance of the network.

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Side note:
I saw some crypto project that allowed project managers to attach bounties to tasks in GitHub. Couldn’t find the name of it unfortunately, but seemed like a neat idea. Ultimately winds up being the same as MaidSafe’s community engagement program, but is something out of the box that any project can use (if they have the funding)

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Yeah my guess is it can probably take many many many months to learn enough of this code base to even begin to possibly contribute to SAFE core code

BitHub? BountySource?

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Both of these are good starts and something I have looked at a lot. We need to eventually get there, but have all the algorithms at least safe secure and working first. Then efficiency can be tied to bounties, even design changes down the road.

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