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Funding Open Source?

Posted by Cliff on from the show-me-da-money dept.

One of the beautiful things about Open Source is that the barriers to entry are next to non-existent, and the adage "have compiler, will travel" embodies this fact well enough. However, as projects grow in size, they will soon face financial stumbling blocks, not to mention a need for increased visibility. How does one best market an Open Source project? What can Joe (or Joni) Coder do to increase their project's financial stability? Have the financially minded people of the Free Software community thought out the possibility of an Open Investment firm? Read on for Slashdot readers who are asking these exact questions!

An Open Investment...
Luke asks: "Open Investment is a concept whereby Open Source principles are applied to making money. Open Investment is inspired by recent articles and diary entries, on Advogato, lamenting the lack of funding of strategic projects. Eric S. Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' papers describe how Open Source projects get off the ground by starting as a programmer's itch turning into something useful to other people.

What if there are strategically important projects that just take too long to ever get off the ground, such as an Open Exchange replacement? With the Economist's recent news on how users expect more and more from IT, how is the Open Source community ever going to keep up? Who is going to pay for it?

The principle behind the Open Investment Initiative is to encourage the Open Source Community to take matters into their own hands, by getting smarter about money. If that happens to mean that programmers become part-time wheeler-dealers and happen to _like_ it better than programming, then good for them! Open source developers (or anybody else for that matter) could even band together to form investment syndicates, with the aim of gaining financial independence.

For the most part, the expectation is that several smart people willing to learn about investing, negotiating and making money get together, and succeed where they would be unable or unwilling to do anything on their own.

Who wants to give it a shot?"

...for a Common Situation?
Yaztromo asks: "I'm the project administrator and lead developer for an Open Source project that brings PalmOS handheld synchronization to Java-enabled platforms, called the jSyncManager.

I started the project back in 1997 for personal use (the full history of the project as available here), and in November of 2002 decided to make it Open Source under the GPL (although parts have since had their license changed to the LGPL to make using our API (especially our plugin APIs) easier for all kinds of developers). After about 8 months we're getting pretty close to final releases of the project for public consumption.

So I've been at this for 8 months, with some success, but am getting to the point where two things concern me:

  1. How do I best market my project?
  2. How can I raise funds to help continue the project?
I imagine that most Open Source projects of any decent size face these same questions, so I'm hoping that Slashdot's contributors who have been involved in other Open Source projects that have faced similar questions would be interested in sharing their ideas and experiences in these two areas.

How have you raised your Open Source projects public profile (particularly if it isn't something that is of general use), and how have you gone about obtaining funding to help take care of those annoying little costs that creep up along the way?"

9 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Gee... by mmol_6453 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought it was called OSDN. Or IBM. Or Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake. Oh, and don't forget Paypal!

    --
    What's this Submit thingy do?
  2. I'll donate some mod points... by MojoRilla · · Score: 1, Funny

    ...for some cool open source!

  3. Open Investment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    So people will make investment decisions based on BSD mailing list flames, sourceforge bugs, and slashdot first posts? Yeah, that will be a big hit on Wall Street.

  4. Have compiler, will travel? by bad_fx · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dang, all these years I thought it was "Have compiler, will sit in basement."

  5. Idea by Micah · · Score: 3, Funny

    1. Write the code. Demonstrate it to people. Maybe distribute it as free beer software in binary-only form.

    2. Offer to sell it for $XXXX to a buyer under any Open Source license they both agree upon.

    3. Profit!

    (Uh oh, something's wrong, where should the "???" go?)

  6. Re:Go live in a friendlier country! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The Great Firewall of China is not a problem??

  7. Just sell it! by Arandir · · Score: 2, Funny

    The FSF groupies keep saying it's free speech not free beer. They keep saying that the GPL doesn't prevent you from selling the software. They keep saying Free Software can be commercial software.

    So just sell the software! You'll go broke, but at least you can hang out with the FSF groupies in the unemployment line.

    p.s. The FSF itself does NOT say this, only those who think RMS is their savior, but never bothered to read any of his writings.

    p.p.s. And of course, if you're the typical slashdot reader, you still won't get it. So let me spell it out: you can't make a living selling Free Software by itself.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  8. Re:It all works until by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    Hobbists always win.

    When i first read that I thought, "Damnit! Don't give away the LOTR ending!", and then I saw that it was Hobbists, not Hobbits. I guess i need more coffee.

  9. Tax breaks for companies by timdaly · · Score: 2, Funny

    If a company contributes software to open source there should be a tax break. This will encourage companies to donate products they plan to withdraw as well as fund people in the company to work on open source.