Litestream author here. I've been on the fence about disclosing the amount. I'm generally open about everything but I know some people get weird about money stuff. I'm also autistic so I tend to not navigate social norms very well. That all being said, the project was acquired for $500k.
Thanks for sharing that. I've never really looked at open source projects as acquisition targets. I see in another comment that you're going to continue releasing it under the Apache license. It's easy for me to see why fly.io would want to hire you, with an agreed percentage (anywhere from 0%-100%) of your time continuing to go into Litestream. If you forgive the blunt question, what more do they get for the $500k (acquisition cost / signing bonus)? (Part of me is wondering if an open source project of mine, which various startups have shown some degree of interest in, is holding a significant payday I hadn't realized. Probably not, but it seems more possible than a moment ago.)
Good question. I think the folks at Fly realize that they get a lot of benefit from enabling open source projects that work well on their platform. They have a somewhat similar approach with the Phoenix project in that they hired Chris McCord to work on it full-time.
Litestream has a lot of potential in being a lightweight, fast, globally-distributed database and that aligns really well with Fly. Continuing to release it as open source means more folks can benefit from it and give feedback -- even if they don't use it on Fly.
I would also be interested in understanding whether there is a proper pricing model for such things. Wordle comes to mind. Or a friend that has an IPad app that took 2 years to build that is something novel but not released. Some projects are open-source and some aren't. Some are acquired for users and some are acqui-hired for continued development. Any interesting advice or links here for folks that don't want to be founders but want to make a solid chunk of cash, have an expertise of value and love the development work.
There's not any real pricing model that I know of. I think it comes down to a question of what value an acquisition brings and that's always kinda fuzzy. If you want specific numbers, the project was at ~5k GitHub stars at the time of acquisition so I guess it's a hundred bucks per star. :)
I've been valuing my GitHub stars at $0. I think there are a lot of open source authors who would be happy to "sell" their project for $100/star while getting a salary to continue development under an open license. Litestream is a well-suited project for fly.io, and there's a missing factor here I still don't understand. Anyway, congratulations!
That actually totally checks out as a Fermi estimation. If you think of starring as developers marking a library that has brought them value, if they starred it, it's probably saved them an hour or so in the long run. So one benny* per star totally checks out.
* Ben Franklin, not Ben Johnson, lol, pun not intended
