It’s about you, not me.
I was listening to a great podcast yesterday. A talk by Rasmus Lerdorf. If you are like me, you just said “who?” Well, Mr. Lerdorf is the person who invented PHP. Now, your saying “What?”
Don’t worry. I wouldn’t know what PHP was if I wasn’t running an internet startup, and truth be told, I really don’t know much about it. PHP is an open source language for building web pages.
So this guy, Mr. Lerdorf, was doing web programming, and he needed better tools, so he wrote a language called PHP. And instead of trying to make money off of it, he just gave it to the world, and let other people have it, use it change it, and improve it. Now, PHP runs some of the biggest sites on the internet, sites you use all the time like YouTube. Yet, it is still free.
It’s tools like PHP, and MySQL that allow sites like Advice Network to exist. Ten years ago, it would have cost 2 million to build Advice Network. Now, $100,000.
Mr. Lerdorf was talking about what it took to start a big open source project that people want to get involved in, and I felt really inspired.
You cannot run a decent open source project if you make it about you. It has to be about the people who contribute… You have to think about how do people feel about themselves when they are involved… We’re all in it together.
That is really how I feel about Advice Network, especially now that people are starting to write. It isn’t about me, it is about you, the writers and readers. And I truly hope that you get a lot out of being here. If you are writing, I hope you feel satisfied knowing that you made someones life easier while they tried to do something really hard. (buy a house, run a business, plan a wedding) AND I hope that it brings you more business.
If you are reading the advice, I hope we made your life easier, AND I hope you have a good experience with one of our vendors
