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. "

Comments

Generic NQS

[Pretender]

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.)

Re:Work for a cool company!

[pim]

I can second that. I do parts of the development on Post Office and other GPL projects during work hours with the knowledge of my employer.

The secret is to look at projects that need to be done inside the company and then define a more generic solution to the problem, that will also fare well outside of the company playground. This is win/win/win for you, your employer and the outside world:

• You win, because you're now no longer coding on a specific project to satisfy only a stupid customer who, at the end, doesn't even grasp the amount of work you did for him/her.
• Your employer wins, because they can offer the same solution to multiple customers without extra overhead. They also get more stable code out of you because of the benefits that come from it being an open source solution.
• The world wins, since it gains another useful program.

Of course, if you're bringing an existing project to a new job, careful selection of an employer that will not be micromanaging every piece of code your produce becomes essential.

Good luck,
Pi

find a job that uses your software

[FoulBeard]

While I am not an expert on the matter here is a suggestion:
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.
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There is alway RedHat.... :)

Re:Dual License -- is this legal?

[Dicky]

This is entirely legal. If you write some code, you can release it under whatever license(s) you want. You are free to release it under the GPL and sell it under a more traditional license at the same time, on the basis that people who don't (or can't) accept the terms of the GPL can buy their way out of it. The problem with this comes when there is more than one author for a program - i.e. any program which has user-submitted patches or enhancements. In that case, you would either need permission from every contributor, or you would need to get them to assign their copyright on their code to you when they submit it, so you can later sell it.

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.