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How Do You Fund an OpenSource Project?
Stuart Herbert asks: "I maintain Generic NQS, a successful, and long-standing, GPL'd project. I'd love to be able to work on this project (or perhaps other GPL'd stuff) as the day job (who wouldn't? ;-) but to do that I need to find funding from somewhere. I'm wondering how many Slashdot readers have been successful in achieving this holy grail without having to setup a company themselves to sell the product, and how they did it. "
If you want to make money off of OSS the first thing that you need to do is support the projects that pay the developers. Do you use Debian? Unless you support the projects that channel their funds directly back to the develpment community, you are the reason good projects are going unfunded. You post questions to Slashdot a million dollar website. Where is the open source alternative? A news website with a paid staff whose advertising revenue goes directly back to the OSS community instead of Andover.net's bank account. If such a website existed - hint - would you use it? Or would you continue to whine about working for nothing on a commercial website? If you disagree with me take a look at the Red Hat worth monitor and ask yourself if that cash would be better utilized by Red Hat or the FSF to finance independent developers. I don't mean to pick on Slashdot or Red Hat. They are just obvious examples. What is important is that you as the Linux user or developer support the projects that channel the cash directly back to the OSS community.
If you spend 4 hours a day writing software and 8 hours selling T shirts to pay for it, your day job is selling T shirts. If you write software and then perform application specific alterations on it, your day job is performing those application specific operations. In no way can you seriously survive off of general purpose applications. The only way is application specific programming.
It sounds like YOUR company could benefit from at least subsidizing GNQS, thus directing Stuart's future development towards feature enhancements/bug fixes that matter to you.
We wrote him asking about the possibility of support contracts. He wasn't interested, I guess (I didn't write him myself, since I don't have any purse-string-control, so I don't have the exact reply, but I guess he was too busy right then?).
We're a nonprofit organization, not a software company, and I suspect that the people in charge here wouldn't see much point to subsidizing him beyond the support contract we buy for all our other software. Since he turned that down (or put us off, I don't remember which)...
If I had my own successful software company, I'd subsidize him. But that and $1.09 will get you a cup of coffee, no more.
I have a related question.
How to run a company producing GPL softwares?
I have some ideas on possible very useful software that I would rather GPL them. My question is, GPL by itself doesn't generate enough funds for such a company - you gotta pay the accountant, lawyer, and all those bills, you know? - and I do not think I want to get the involvement of a venture capital in the company either. After all, not all venture capitalists are as enlightened as the one who funds Zope.
So back to my question - HOW to run a company that producing GPL software?
If you have any idea, I want to know.
Thank you.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ronnie Horesh, an economist in New Zealand, proposed an idea called social policy bonds to bring free-market forces to bear on social problems. The idea in a nutshell is this:
In this scheme, bond holders have no incentive to compete with one another. When one wins, all win.To move this to OSS development, it must be privatized. I must be able to issue a bond as an individual. So I place my chunk of money in escrow, possibly with one of the e-cash outfits, and in return I get an unforgeable certificate, which I sell on eBay or elsewhere.
The escrow agency which holds my money must be trusted by everybody, and it needs to be able to create an unforgeable transferrable certificate. A sufficiently large e-cash outfit should meet both criteria.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
A number of open source contributers start out
as university students and sometimes hang on.
For example Stallman of MIT, Bill Joy at Berekely
and Linus Tovalds at his college.
The lure of big industry bucks then draws most
of these kinds away, especially at Stanford &
Silicon Valley, my home base.
That is a good question. He only gave a page name which is too generic to find in web searches, as there are too many documents with that name to identify his. But maybe his site is actually about something else.
Linuxfund is an affinity card program. It's goal is to collect money to distribute to wortwhile Open Source programs. I am not sure they have already distributing funds, but you still can try at http://linuxfund.org/
Well, in general, management/companies don't give a rat's ass about "free speech" - they care about $$$ - so you have to present this to them as free as in beer, because it's what they understand. If you presented it as "You can pay me to work on a piece of software, so I can give it away" they'd laugh in your face.
Secondly, You obviously didn't read the entire post.
The "poor ripped-off programmers" you're talking about _DO_ get something: they get a working, functioning, piece of software... if they don't want to be "ripped off" then they're perfectly welcome to to ignore it. But the fundamental tenet is this: If they use it, and there is a feature it's lacking, or a bug that annoys them, then they can contribute, IF THEY WANT. This is how all open-source works, whether it's Linux, BSD, Apache, or anything else.
When I write a Roxen module, and release it under the GPL, do I get pissed off that Idonex will probably be making money off it? (if they decide to package it with Challenger) Not on your life. Did I get "ripped off"? Nope. So what did I get out of it? I got one hell of a terrific web server.
Please open your mind a little, I do realize that "free speech" and "free beer" are two very different things, but you must realize that while they are different, they are very closely linked together.
There are many good replies here, but people are still missing the
most obvious (at least to me):
Sell your employer the #1 benefit of GPL'ed code, which is (if it's a
good project - one that will draw interest) that they will get
submissions from others, FOR "FREE"...
OK, say you're writing a new app (something that would inspire
interest from other people) - once you have a semi-working product,
approach your boss with the idea to release it under GPL; convince
him/her that you could have dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of other
programmers working for the price of your salary... productivity would
increase, and you'll get a better end product. The "free" workers get
a good app, your company gets "free" workers, so everybody wins.
If you think about it, that's the reason Linux exists.. you just have
to follow the model.
Email me your mailing address, and I will write you a check (I'm not rich so don't get your hopes up). Your ASP2PHP program is used by me almost daily.
my email addy is
haven@linuxstart.nospam.com
This would apply if a company wants to use the gpl'ed software in a commercial, closed-source project. Can't do it under the GPL, but if you can get the same code under a diffrent license...
The biggest problem is how to get money when working on a true opensource-project (multiple developers through CVS). What I thought was this:
:)
1. Make the base work (first version). You have to do this anyway if you want people to join.
2. The license is GPL but can be released as closed-source for $$$ (like Quake). This requires all other developers to release there changes under the same "dual licence". Why would they? Because all money generated by the project will be split; 50% for you and 50% to share between all other developers. I actually think this would be pretty fair - if you get money early you will loose a bit but the more others do, the more favourable it will be. And if you start the next cool thing and retire, you will really hit it off
3. Any contributions not being released this way (ie pure GPL) is not part of the version that can be sold - on the other hand the contributors will of course not get any money.
3. The license can be a bit more restrictive; ie the product can not be used commercially without a fee being paid per user/installation etc which would generate more money. Not GPL anymore though - but you still get (almost) all the benefits of opensource.
I think this might work...
Seems like it would behoove the open-source community to put together some funding for itself. There could be some sort of developers forum where the people who contributed money were enabled to determine which projects got funding. Kind of similar to Co-Source, except the idea isn't to match up customers to developers, but rather, get funding, and then decide where to put the money. Funding might be nothing more than donation (investment) from open-source community members.
Another idea is to form a company that offers end-user support and software development to customers, entirely through the open-source community who essentially become it's "employees". Employees are re-imbursed based on what exactly they do. A simplistic model might be a customer subscribes to the service for $X/month. This gives them X points/month to "spend". They spend the points on questions asked in forums, or toward software projects certain open-source developers are working on. The points get collected by those who answer the questions, or those who develop software to solve the customer's problem, and the company pays the developers $.70 per point, or some such thing.
The company's website might be a combination of sourceforge, co-source, deja-news/newsgroups, and slashdot. Put this all together and form a developer-end-user community.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
WRONG! If you run an Open Source project and you don't get contributed code assigned to you (and then forward it to RMS) then you DO NOT own that code. You do not have rights to distribute that code. All ownership resides with the contributor. This is why RMS makes a big deal out of getting people to assign their code to the Free Software Foundation. For instance, if you pop on over to http://www.xemacs.org and read about the differences between XEmacs and GNUEmacs, you'll see that one of the big reasons the XEmacs code has not been re-integrated into the GNU/Emacs is because some of the contributors have not (or perhaps refuse for philosophical reasons) assigned the rights to the Free Software Foundation. I'm not aware of an court cases involving open source software, so I'm *pretty sure* that the first one that comes about will go ALL ACROSS THE BOARD: The company that sues will stick to a strict interpretation of copyright law (i.e., the GPL is hogwash, and that it's not clear even if it was legal, whether the source code IN QUESTION was clean, and untainted by other licenses -- what if code under one license gets combined with GPL code? What license is it under? Can you prove that all the code in your tree is 100% GPL'd? I strongly doubt that any open source project can say this -- most don't keep any records of anything. LET ME CLARIFY: You probably *do not* have legal rights to distribute GPL'd code, for the same reason you probably *do not* have legal rights to distribute a shrink-wrapped binary version - No one has assigned the code to you. It doesn't matter if you're giving it away or selling it. For all you know half your contributions could be from proprietary code bases that programmers mistakeningly thought their company had no interest in...
Visit LinuxLot http://www.linuxlot.com/ for the best prices on Linux books!
Work days, code nights
If you do chose this course, here are some things I've found that improve things:
Find a local friend to work with on this project. This will get you out of your house at least some of the time, and could help keep you sane.
If you've got hardware you can cart around (a laptop, or a desktop you don't mind lugging with you (what I do)) I do recommend taking it to a coffee shop and hacking there every so often.
Everything else I can think of to suggest is obvious, along the lines of "don't run yourself into the ground"
Good luck and happy hacking.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Linux \subset OSS, but not Linux = OSS. (I wish LaTex would have a \subsetnoteq...)
I know, slashdot doesn't have an OpenSource topic [yet], but "Linux" doesn't match this
any better than "GNU is Not Unix", "BSD", or even "Apache" do.
Maybe "The Almighty Buck" (money) since we're talking about getting $$$ here...
However, if they only use the tool internally, then they do not have to give the modified source to anyone except the people who use it internally, and they can legally require that you do not give out any modifications. Then it may become even harder to work on the project because any additions, on or off the job, might fall under company IP.
The only way I can see is similar to this, find a company or companies that use your product and get support contracts with them. The important part is making sure the company understands your goals in the contract (I assume the biggies are you want to be just a one man person who adds features/does unit testing, and you don't want to be 1(800)configg for them). If they use you product internally, then they will have people to do set up. You are just doing features support.
when you do this, you may want to incorporate (it's not as hard as you think. There are big shortcuts to incorporation for individuals/small businesses) to protect yourself liability wise (that way if theres a big problem, you don't go bankrupt, the corporation does).
-no broken link
And, if the price of funding an OSS solution to their problem is less than the fees for custom programming, then it may well be justified for more buyers than you might imagine.
In the long run, OSS projects are inherently cheaper. All you must do is establish a solid, well-written base of code, and release that. Then, bug fixes, patches, enhancements (and effectively the remaining work on the project) will filter in over time as other developers worldwide use your software for their own needs and add to it. Since this work is free and can represent a sizable portion of the project, the total cost of such a project cannot possibly be more expensive than a closed-source version.
The "price" of the cheaper OSS solution is that you cannot prevent your competitors from using your developed software, you cannot sell your software in the traditional way (or at least not as effectively as the public become saavy to OSS), and you might not get an OSS solution as fast as a custom programmed solution (debatable). On the other hand, if a buyer wants the satisfaction of barring competitors from the code, complete intellectual property control, or rapid development, then they are free to pay the premium of closed source. There will always be such buyers.
The solution I found was that my day job supports the OSS development concept.
My day job involves working with PLC programming, MMI (ok, now called HMI) design and development. Ever since I've been there (6 years now) we've supported the Open Source theory on things - when we do a project, we give the customer the source code to the project when we are done. Note that we supported Open Source, not GPL
One development package that we use costs $7800 per development unit, and $3200 per runtime - and it's getting more expensive. So, I wrote up a very long proposal for a project called Jaguar HMI that explains what the GPL is, how it applies to us, and the benefits.
Less than a week later, development of Jaguar HMI became part of my job, along with setting up all the resources for the project, etc.
So, my suggestion is - look towards companies who have to rely on that particular type of software to survive. Once they see the benefits, and you sell them on yourself, it's possible to set up an arrangement like I have.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Following along nearly the same line of arguement of producing two code bases. Instead of having two forked source code trees completely seperate the source code tree is split at the losest possible level.
For instance, say you develop a product which can both be compiled for Linux and Windows. The differences between the two come from the places where different objects have to be used to integrate the OS independant code into the OS.
Now the Linux code is released under the GPL license. Note this both includes the Linux OS dependant code and the OS independant code. The Windows version is released under another license and in this license it staights something to the effect that the Windows dependant code is the property of the author - hence propertory. However the OS independant code is still under the GPL release. But the Windows version has to have a license bought for it.
This means that the OS independant and the Linux dependant code is open source and thus can go through the same process of modification and alteration as other GPLd code.
Now I don't know how far you can go down this path or with this approach without volation of the GPL. I think this approach is alright if you are the author of the project and the original source code and any modifications made from the open-source community are of low enough volume that the majority of the work is still created by yourself.
However I don't think its alright to take a GPL'd product add-on a couple of parts to make it run under another OS and then go selling the product using the same arguement - simply because the majority of the work wouldn't be carried out by the person selling the modified product.
Yeah, VA Linux are good guys and all that, but you have to look ahead to the next change of control, either due to acquisition or other management events. VA Linux is headed for heavy stockholder pressure; look at LNUX stock, down more than 50% from the first day. Scary.
A model that failed can be found at: http://vrml3d.com/race/
Reaction from Open Source advocates in the VRML community was hostile. Reaction from others was non-existant.
It's looking more and more like there is really no way to make any kind of money at all from software alone. It would appear that software is becoming like the mints that appear on pillows in motel rooms: People don't expect to pay for it directly. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to produce the goods unless you already have a contract to produce them.
I am considering the possibility of making certain components Open Source, using a license that would allow closed source licensing of aggregations of said components. With N components, you can conceivably create N^N products. That's a lot of custom software.
For now, I'm rather turned off on the Open Source community. My vision of community has always been someplace where you can borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor. Other people seem to think that community is a place where you are a heel if you don't collectivize your sugar plantation.
As an independant developer, not funded by govt, academia, or a corporate parent, it appears to be a lost cause. I still have time to make a choice. I'm leaning towards forming an association like the Independant JPEG Group. Their license allows for an Open Source development model *and* reuse in closed source products. Even MS Internet Explorer uses IJG code! So, if your project is useful and cool enough, being the "alpha geek" in that project could make you a valuable corporate asset (Linus, Transmeta). I have no idea how well the IJG programmers are doing, but I'm sure they don't starve.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Leave the sofware just as free as it has always been, but offer support only to those who are willing to pay for that support.
:)
Many people who would like to use your product probably need help setting it up and integrating it into their systems.
Set up a very professional looking site, it would be worth paying a specialist to help you create custom graphics and a consistant design.
Then provide information in the documentation, or if it is a Xwindow based product, provide a help button that is a little sales blurb to your web site. And if they can just click a button on your app and it launches a browser with a window to your support site, so much the better.
You can offer configuration classes. Charge people around a thousand dollars a head for a weeks worth of class. Offer this class at least once a quarter. Businesses love sending their employees to these things. Employees love going to a nice location and getting a little break from their day to day jobs.
Keep in mind that you will spend a week getting ready for the class and will need a break afterward. Teaching is very hard work.
You can also offer phone support at a set fee per minute. Get a 900 number for this. Or you can charge a set fee for a set number of incidents, or for a set period of time. I would charge at least $250 per incident, $1,000 for 10 incidents, or a $2,500 a year support contract. This is for off site _only._
If they want you to come on-site then we are talking time and materials, oh yeah buddy! I wouldn't charge less than $125 an hour for this service and would start charging when I left the house and would stop charging when I got back. And they would pick up the tab on all your food, travel and lodging while you worked for them. You'll need a platinum card or an American Express card for this. Get a Purchase Order from the company _before_ you jump on a jet plane. Or drive across country.
Don't forget to charge a billing fee if they go over 30 days and 60 days. If they go over 90 days they probably aren't going to pay. Contact a lawyer...
Once you get all of this running smoothly you can then hire a couple of people to answer the phones and to go running over god's green earth, and to manage your business, while you program and ensure that all the other people keep working.
You may find that you are spending less time programming than you did before you started all this, but that is the life of the consultant.
-- Never make a general statement.
You may be able to get government funding for new technology ventures. This varies depending on the local governments: city, province/state, federal..
It seems that government funding is really interested in job creation vs. technology. The key is to say that your project will create a large number of new jobs and generate $$
Another option is to generate $$ by advertising on your website. See if you can get corporate sponsors that would use your product or would work in conjunction with your product to pay for advertising.
For example, here's my game plan. I have a website called Introduction to Data Communications. It is a book about data communications (surprise!). I tried the publishing route but either the contracts were too restrictive, or required me to give away the complete rights to the book or the publishers wanted something very specific (Can you expand the two chapters into 450 pages?). So I'm giving away the book gpl'd. I have received many calls from post-secondary institutes requesting the zipped/tarred html, pdf or ps version which I hope to have ready this week (sigh..)
I will be contacting every possible company that has anything to do with any one of the over 300 pages of data communication. I figure if I can get one advertiser at $10/month per page than I will be so happy that I will be whistling dixie out my asshole. We'll see. Maybe somebody will rip off my website and do it themselves, now that I've blabbed to the world....
SourceForge is a service provided by VA to the open source community. The URL is sourceforge.net. They provide a complete hosting solution, including disk space, CVS repository, mailing lists, web space, and many other services that I'm only starting to explore. It appears to be well funded, with three people and quite a stack of hardware. I'm trying it for my own project, enhancing the Print plugin for the Gimp (check it out, although I only got started yesterday with SourceForge).
Another possibility would be to contact Red Hat and VA to see if they would be interested in funding your project (i. e. hiring you as an employee or a consultant).
Whenever I think about this, my thought is a dual license. Release a library under GPL (to prevent linking against non-GPL I think, if not, substitue another license there) and offer to release under a different license for a fee. This way, the software is out there, commercial companies can benifit, and the author can benifit. It would require that all submitters of patches/additions do so with a dual license (allowing the maintainer to relicense for a profit) and it would be a good idea to give some profits back to those that made significant contributions to a project. I've often thought about this, but never tried it, which is why I'm posting it here I suppose.
I'm working on a really cool project right now at work. It's a Mason/mod_perl-based front-end to RRDtool. Since its development directly benefits my employer, they have no problem letting me work on it. Once I get this thing into a state that is worth distributing, it will most likely be open-sourced.
The easiest way to get your project funded is to get a job at a place lets you do "project" work and is also open source-friendly like my employer. Chances are, if your project is cool, there is some commercial potential for it.
Good Luck!
Chris
The most common one being: No funding at all. Do it in your spare time. Work days, code nights. For Example AIDE is not funded by anyone.
Others that I have seen include your own company: See GNOME, Miguel de Icaza
Government funding: Gnupg
As a part of your work: Redhat labs,Xfree86
Public project house: CoSource, SourceXchange
AIDE - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment
One cool way to do this is to sell your data. You're often writing a new tool because you want to work with data more easily. Well, because you're the author, odds are good you know how to use your software better than the average bloke, so you might be able to turn a dime working on the data your software is designed to handle.
:)
For instance:
1. If it's a game, sell the artwork, levels,
and sound files. These are called "mission
packs" in the game industry.
2. If you're writing a GUI like GNOME or KDE,
then sell the artwork for "themes".
3. If you're writing a music composition
proggy, then sell music. Um, nevermind.
Better keep your day job on this one.
Guess it goes w/o saying, but some data is easier to sell than others.
Anyway, if working on the data is too much of a load, or you don't want to work at that, then try to partner with someone who is good at it. In exchange for splitting the profits, he gets a piece of software that is custom-designed for and around his artwork/etc, and you get gorgeous data to help demo the killer function of your proggy, and you both get a little scratch, hopefully.
I think that there is scope for a slightly different kind of relationship between employee and employer.
;-)
RedHat, SuSE, VA etc. all make money from things that they do not own fully. Since they rely on having good software to bundle with their distribution, it follows that they should take an active interest in ensuring that software gets written. (OK, nothing mind-blowing in there
Instead of the CoSource type model of doing a single task for money, the Free Software companies should fund individuals to write software full time. That is, pay the individual a full salary with the guarantee that said individual will produce an output that an old-style proprietry software house would accept. (that varies wildly, I know)
I can appreciate that many companies would have a problem paying someone to write code that any other company could use, so maybe some kind of charitable foundation (mmm, tax breaks) is the way forward. (didn't I read somewhere about a foundation for free software advocacy being set up? does it involve bob young?)
Rather than do a job, then leave as in CoSource, you would be a permanent employee of a charity. (Free Software Foundation?) Companies that use free software would donate to this charity, which would then use the money to pay people.
Hmm, does this fall under a charity? It could be described as a way for companies to dodge tax. (do employees of charities get tax breaks?)
I've always thought that the FSF could do more to promote itself - sell stuff through it's website (promoting GPL e-commerce?), advertise, employ. Why not employ a whole bunch of MS marketing gurus to promote the FSF? I'd imagine that a lot more people would buy GPL'd software if they were aware they could.
I think that having the software available to a company is more desirable than simply relying on the Free Software Community to do what you want. If paying a charity that employs highly-motivated individuals to write lots of code can be shown to be "profitable" then companies may go for it.
Anyway, I'd contact the FSF. I think they'd have the best idea on how to make writing gpl code pay for the roof over your head.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
I get paid to write open-source software.
I'd rather not tell the specifics of my case, but I would love to disclose my method: On your own time, do a substantial amount of development on an open source project of the kind that your company wants, or better yet, needs to survive. Then present it to your boss as "a FREE, nearly-completed solution to our problem!". Make sure your project entails continual development.
Hooked on OSS worked for me!
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.
It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Try looking at CoSource. I've been able to develop GPLed code and be paid for it
(well, actually I think the check is still in the post, as I haven't got it yet, but I digress).
There's quite a bit of cash floating about and CoSource has a few ideas on how to
make cash from software you are already developing, so I'd urge you to take a look.
Another avenue is sourceXchange, who cater for the corporate taste; but you
will have to convince a reasonably sized company to sponsor you.
Savant
I actually put a couple programs out on the net thinking that if a company makes money on the programs I wrote they would be kind enough to send me money for them. Well, actually at first I asked for money if my programs were used commercially and instead all I got was hate mail from people who I guess didn't understand why I wanted to make money on my programs :(
:(
:) (I'm the author of ASP2PHP and Naken Chat) and people sometimes thank me (and of course people still flame me cause I'm not GPL.. :( )..
:)
I've also actually had multiple people tell me that if I add such-and-such feature to my chat server program they would pay for my time. After I add the feature I never hear from them again.
/me bends over
Well.. at least they were fun programs to write
Anyway..
I would like to comment briefly on Stuart's project, Generic NQS. I'm sure that there are a million projects out there that "really need" some sort of funding, but I am surprised that nobody's taken on NQS yet.
For those who don't know, NQS is a load-balancing daemon for just about anything that can be queued, and it can be run on just one machine or a cluster of them. Very flexible, powerful stuff; useful for those of us who need more power than "at/batch" gives us.
I would think that a large application provider (ala SAP/R3, or Oracle or Informix) who is committed to Linux would be interested in funding your project. Our own in-house database product (Datatel Benefactor running on Ardent's Unidata database) is running on Tru64-Unix, but we have a very complicated hierarchy of users here and we needed the control and capabilities of something like GNQS to maintain order that could not easily be maintained using atq's and the like. This way, too, should we ever move up to another server in addition to the current one, we can balance across two nodes.
My point is, perhaps in your specific case you need to get noticed by a major applications vendor who has a use for the flexible scheduling and load-balancing capabilities of your product. The average guy doesn't have a need for it; I only found your product by sheer accident one day, and now it's my organization's first foray into GPL'd software. (Since its phenomenal success, we have added a few more.)
While I am not an expert on the matter here is a suggestion: :)
There is alway RedHat.... :)
1. find a company that uses your product, as a main part of their solution, preferably one you would want to work at
2. Then along with working on their solution you can also work on yours along with adding specialized functionality with the product, as long as it maintains its GPL license which it has too:)
3. In effect you become a little mini-VAR just for their company. This allows you to get paid for developing you product.
4. It is just one suggestion, It may not be the best or the most obvious but I beleive it is a valid suggstion.
------------------------------------------------
As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life