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A New Free Software Donation Directory
Wolfgang Spraul writes: "CoSource and SourceXchange are closed. They became part of the history of Open Source Software Markets. However, I still need a place where I can find maintainers or core developers of existing Free Software packages that accept my feature request and payment, implement the feature within a reasonable timeframe and give me support if it doesn't work in my environment.
Since no such place is in sight, I launched the Free Software Donation Directory as a first step. What do you think? How should the next Free Software market look like? Should there be one at all?" Right now, he's got around 20 projects listed, if you care to invest in some Free software.
Why don't you just make it a site where you can hire open source developers? Donations seem too much like charity, and I think it can be demeaning to those who write the features you want.
Most free software developers are quite short of time because the project they work on is in their spare time and not their day job. Or if it is their day job, the time they have for 'cool features' is limited because the more boring and lucrative parts need doing first.
If you have to work on only a few features, wouldn't you do those which scratch your own itch rather than those you were paid for? If you wanted to change the developer's mind about what to implement, you'd probably have to bid a lot more than just a thousand dollars. I wonder what the hourly rate of pay was for the projects on SourceXchange or CoSource, and how that compared with what the developers could earn in the 'outside world'.
There are lots of small improvements to free software projects for which I'd be prepared to pay a $100 bounty, but that amount seems insultingly small for the work involved. If I work as a software developer myself, the time spent to earn $100 is probably about the same as the time that the $100 would buy for another developer. Okay, maybe I take three times as long to implement a feature for project X because I've never before seen the code for that project, but if you take into account tax (so I see only $70 of the money earned, and the other developer sees only $50 of that) and other overheads, it doesn't seem like a particularly good deal. Sites like CoSource might be useful for _users_ to find development, but it's the first rule of software that users don't know what they want. Unless they are really big users (like the Weather Channel funding Radeon 8500 drivers), and then they probably don't need someone else's website.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think the biggest problem with the likes of SourceXchange (and others) was that they tended to request software that cost WAY more to develop than was being paid. (e.g. $100 to convert a J2EE server to use HPs proprietary RMI ripoff.) This just isn't good business for programmers. My free time is worth way more than the $.50/hr that it would end up as.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Isn't that like creating a new Google just for open source software? Why not just use the resources we already have? ... SourceForge ... is the one place where almost all open source projects are listed.
I think the answer to your question is pretty much the same as the answer to the question "Why should there be any software companies besides Microsoft?"
Diversity rocks. There needs be a market that supports a number of competing solutions to the same question.
Jumping back to your Google Reference. The Google relevancy engine depends on smaller sites that essentially vote for their favorites sites with links pages.
Uh?
I don't see the need of this.
You can simply find the website or mailing list for the software you need support or new futures and contact them directly.
For instance, if you need one feature to get added to, say, Vim, you could go to their site, find out the addresses for their mailing list and then send them a message stating with your feature request and your interest in paying USD $500 to whoever implements it.
Thanks.
Alejo.
Lets say the feature is worth $100 to you, so you offer $100 for it.
It costs the programmer $500 to do it.
If you are the only one sponsoring it, nobody does it.
If 4 other people feel that it is worth $100 to them, and put up $100, the programmer gets his $500, and everyone paid $100 for the feature.
While something like this or SourceXchange is great for advertising the fact that there can be a paying market for OSS (i.e. advocacy reasons), is it really neccesary from a practical standpoint?
Sometime last year a company I was working for needed a new feature added to a high-profile OSS app before we could use it in our office, so we just emailed one of the developers and negotiated a rate - the task was quickly done and everyone was happy.
Bottom line: unlike the myriad layers of corporate bullshit that sit on top of the average proprietary software developer, most OSS developers are directly reachable - just grab their address from the project's mailing list and ask if they want to earn some $$$ fufilling your feature request... No fancy 'marketplace' site needed - the whole internet is the marketplace.
Got a problem with software from M$ or Macromedia or Adobe, etc.? Try calling the main switchboard and asking for the developer who coded that particular feature, so you can ask him about it... Yah...
accepts your payment, for free software.... for free software....
Free as in, I need this done, I'm willing to pay for it, but you can give it away to anyone else out there, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
It's kinda like a church. Generally, churches need some sort of place to hold worship services in, and buildings don't get built unless people give money. However, after they get built, they're free and open to all members and guests, including those who haven't given any money. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, but you get the point)
If you don't like that analogy, think of PBS. Certain foundations want shows made to deal with certain topics, and they pay for their production and later may subsidize their broadcast. That's how a lot of the shows get paid for. You don't have to pay to watch PBS, either.
Get off my launchpad!
accepts your payment, for free software.... for free software....
Sigh. Free as in speech. Not as in beer. When will people get this?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
No, they cant use their Sourceforge accounts for donation pages. As long as they use SF for website space, having a donation page is in violation of the liscense/use agreement.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
You're right, it'd take far more money than most people are willing to offer to actually pay for development at a reasonable rate. However, I could see it working as a way to encourage authors to continue working on their projects, while getting your pet features a bit higher up on the priority list. If I were a project manager and I had 5 or so features I was planning to implement in the near future, if someone paid $100 in favor of one of them, I might well not mind getting that one done first. Sure, for $100 few people will develop an entirely new feature that otherwise they wouldn't have done, but it might be enough to encourage them to shift priorities around a bit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's crazy. Businesses are already extremely efficient at providing new features and support. They are experts at those kinds of contracts and open source volunteers can't compete against them in such a simple minded way.
The real funding need in the open source world is sustained, long-term funding for creative, exploratory research and development. We don't need customers who want to buy "features" or "support" -- we need customers who want to simply PAY US TO HACK on new and interesting projects that may be too new to help many customers directly today, but that will help the open source world evolve tomorrow. It's because we in the open source world don't pay people to "just explore" that Bill Gates gets to say the GPL is bad for the industry and unamerican and that fascistic copyright protections are a necessity.
This sounds a bit like what is being done with the Free Blender Project , as covered in this story.
$500 to convert J2EE server to use HPs proprietary RMI. You sir are an IDIOT! You probably don't even know what RMI is. First of all you would need a team do it then you would need a qa team to debug it unless you want to install buggy code on enterpise machines. Lastly, just to do that you would need full time programmers.
LOL! You are funny, aren't you? Do you realize that when SourceXchange opened, HP contracted to have extactly that done? They were paying $1000 to the person who could get it done first. As you can guess, there weren't too many takers.
BTW, RMI stands for Remote Method Invocation. It is a way of allowing a remote "stub" object to be used to call method calls on an object on some other machine. The work of converting could have been done by one person by just putting in a translation layer. It just wasn't worth it when the day was done.
Moral: Piss off
Moral: "Every prudent man acts out of knowledge, but a fool exposes his folly." -Proverbs 13:16
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A directory is good though. Freshmeat or the like would be the obvious place home for it, just another field or so attached to each project's record.
"What's the difference between free/open source software and shareware, again?"
Freedom
what's the matter with you? I checked your link about cats. don't know why cause i figured it was a troll. but then 'boss is a cunt' comes flashing on my screen. at work. maybe you should get a clue. it's people who do shit like this that need a serious facial readjustment.
Nobody want's to pay the cost needed to develop something. The way this could work, is if it were a way to allow several (100's?) of groups to combine their contribution. It would probably need to be structured rather like those mathematics prizes, where the money can sit around uncollected for decades. But it would also somehow need to accumulate some of the prestige of those prizes. The money is only a part of the payoff when you win a mathematics prize. Another part is that it was you who did it.
Probably the best way to do it would be as a PR event at some convention in hackerdom. Announce the challenge in advance, say, a month, and present the award at an event. This would mean that it would need to be an interesting problem, and also that it wouldn't be too difficult to solve in that time. The award would be for the best solution.
At the end of the event, announce the problem for the next year. This one could be more difficult, but it would still need to be quite interesting. After a couple of years, the award might begin to be rather prestigeous. Then, in addition to the yearly problem, you could announce a challenge problem, with a two year deadline. Etc.
Perhaps there should be ancillary events. High School challenges. College challenges. etc. as well as the free-for-all challenges.
This is a considerably more elaborate effort than SourceXchange ever was. It requires more investment than that did. To justify itself, it would need to be a part of the PR budget as well as a part of the "get this software" budget. Probably more so, as you couldn't count on an answer that was sufficiently good at any particular time.
SourceXchange was nearly an effort to get something for nothing. It wasn't a bad idea, but the people who bid on the software had no idea of development costs (in time-effort). So they underbid and got ignored.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
For more information, check Open Soars
Personally, I don't like the word "donate", as it basically means giving away money, and not caring how it is used. If you pay for Damian to work on Perl, you more or less know what you get (well, not really, but you know it's going to be really cool stuff). If someone put up a similar project to pay for some gcc überhacker, I might be interested. On the other hand, just donating my windows tax to the gcc project without knowing how it will be spent seems a little silly.
And more over, if people aren't interested enough in the same feature I want, I don't want my money to be used for other things (I guess most people organizing this sort of thing are pretty ethical, and try to use the money for something similar, but I still don't like the idea of random donations.
We need a safe scheme for both parties (donators and developers) to raise money from the public, where the developers only get the money if it is enough to keep them occupied on the project it is supposed to help, and otherwise, nobody looses anything. I'm not sure how something like this would work, trust is hard to establish across economic and legal borders.
It seems to me that we need some trusted financial entity (third-party) to organize the fundraising, that is acceptable to both developers and donators. I guess the ideal entity would be a bank, put your donations into the banks account, and unless the minimum amount of money is reached (after some agreed-upon date) the bank promises to pay everybody back (minus some fees of course). Anybody knows if this is a realistic option?