Ask Jason: Is it wise to build a platform on someone elses code?

type in or are they calling in okay do we have our caller hello hello hi how are you doing who's on the line hi my name is fuji from germany how are you doing fuyyi from germany and i see i could tell from your name fuyee obviously germany no uh you're germany via china um i came from i'm born and raised in malaysia and i'm doing my studies in germany ah okay very good so you have a question for us let's hear it yes that's correct um so i'm not the expert computer scientist here so uh what i've been doing is that basically i tend to look around for projects and maybe try to build on other people's projects because i have a little bit of skill in game design so to speak but i don't have like i don't have the computer science skills needed to create a game engine for example so i've been like looking around the internet and found that there are several game engines that are interesting but they kind of lack these social features for example like virality loops in facebook or yeah for example so so my idea is like uh can i maybe build on top of this like open source games game engines and maybe like probably make a profit out of it do you think it's a good idea to do that because all these games game engines are basically open sourced and yeah when i build on top of that i have to release the source code so do you think in a business sense this is a is it a good way to go forward it's um it's definitely a good idea uh if you're looking to get hired make a product that people are willing to pay for maybe not so much you would have to because you're building off of an open source project it's share and share alike so to speak they give you their source code you build on it and you have to give your source code to everybody else that being said just having the source code is not enough for a lot of people they want to have the person who built it some consulting they want some services they may want some specialization so a great way for a developer to get themselves out there is to get into the irc chat room for a specific piece of software maybe it's cassandra or maybe it's django whatever and to actually contribute to code and to build little projects so in the django project there's ten different people who built blog platforms on top of it because people kept complaining there's no blogging software or so many complaints there's no game mechanics or virtual currency or point system on top of this gaming thing it's a great idea and that's actually one of the best ways for you to meet people who are in the industry but you got to couple it with being in that irc and maybe having a little blog and a twitter account dedicated to these topics so that you can sort of virally spread what you're doing and also participating maybe in hacker news when those type of threads come up and mention hey i'm you know say something intelligent and at the end say oh and if you're interested i'm working on a project if anybody wants to contribute so you're not sort of spamming it like check out my project you're adding to the discussion and then adding that tim you have anything to add to that yeah i mean i think i would just view it as a learning experience um you know open source platforms to try to build a closed platform on top of it will be really difficult so i would try to you know view it as a learning for your yourself but also you know like you said jason to meet other people uh and basically to hook into that community yeah and that's this is what open source is about this is why most people do it there's been a many studies and a lot of people misinterpret why people are involved in open source projects you know they say oh my god people are involved in an open source project because they want to like help the world and oh my god there's altruism it's not exactly always that case a lot of times people are looking to network to socialize to find a job to participate in something challenging it's not really like they're trying to save the world in most cases they usually have some combination of self-interest um you know and community interest they want to get a job and they know the community will help them they want to learn and so they help the community so it's sort of like one hand washes the other and it's great it would be the equivalent of contributing to a blog that was an unpaid blog or posting really good comments on hacker news an irc chat room or a question and answer service stack overflow or whatever and you get your name known make sure you use a memorable handle so if you were working on cassandra you could make yourself you know cassandra guy and it sounds corny but if you were or you know you could be db guy or something whatever it is you know sql guy or mrs nosql whatever it is but do brand yourself a little bit in there so people can go oh that guy's got the same domain name as his handle he's got a logo sort of personal branding on top of it will um will help does that help yeah cool okay have you been listening to the show for a long time phil

yeah uh everything to like 20 to 25 episodes so far oh wow so you're working backwards through the archive uh yeah that's what i'm doing right now right yeah by the way i was in i was at techcrunch50 and i saw you guys in san francisco last year so great uh well make sure you come to the launch conference we'll have information on that hopefully next week tyler should have the date lockdown and hopefully you can make it we'll talk to you soon take care