[ube]

My take on this is that they want to take 3 to 4 months of complete focus on coding and design. If you involve too many people by open sourcing it now - you could easily have a "too many cooks" syndrome and the whole project gets bogged down by too many opinions and too much time spent on moderation.

[dschobel]

Put the work on something like github, let everyone fork to their hearts content, only accept back what you think is useful. Projects way bigger than this one use this workflow to great effect.

Two major red flags for me:

1. Money up front to a team of unknowns

2. Secluding your work for a big unveiling down the road

I wish them all the best but I think they were the surprise beneficiaries of a strong anti-FB sentiment, nothing more.

[ekanes]

Sure, but they could always roll it out and say "The code is available, but fair warning - we want to focus on getting this up and running before we start reviewing suggestions."

[ube]

Really...so releasing in 3 months is not fast enough for you? If it was me, I'd want to work on it for 3 months and during that time - talk to other folks that are working on similar issues and have the code reviewed by some trusted mentors. This is pure speculation on my part but I suspect they already have that in mind...per their blog:

"...If you want to see what we are up to, we will be hanging out on the GNU Social mailing list, as well as a few other places as we work on defining some common protocols between like minded projects."