Slashdot Mirror
Funding Open Source?
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:
- How do I best market my project?
- How can I raise funds to help continue the project?
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?"
If you have a site with lots of content, say a knowledge base, or multiple language installation guides for your software, or a big forum.. then using Google Adsense might help bring some money into the coffers. I know quite a few people who get four figures a month rolling in.
The benefit of this is it doesn't infringe on any ethical issues.. such as.. this company gave me $1000 and asked for 'X feature' which might harm the program's reputation.. should I add it? should I not?
Some of the open source projects deal directly with hardware. One of the things that we as OSS users can do is to contribute money and/or hardware to the developers, so that they can afford the equipment that they need in order to develop modules.
.11a was the goal, then the a/b chipsets were released. Then the b/g chipsets, and now the a/b/g chipsets. We still don't have an open .11a implementation, not to mention the others. Some of the projects, like the atheros chipset project, aren't terribly far off from .11a, but without more hardware, the variants won't be completed.
An example of this is the various 802.11* projects for different chipsets. Originally
Get together on your mailing lists, and buy the developer some hardware. That way, they have more of what they need to work with in order to make use of their programming skills.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A lot of things like
- A commercial free based spin off
- form company for services etc, or total solution provider
- consultant
- books
I'm in a open source project, and nearly tried them all. While true that they are possible, they only tend to work for very high profile projects.
Moreover, you'll need several manyears worth of polishing to even qualify.
Several Open Source projects are nicely funded doing the same thing. Take for instance the OSS telephone project Asterisk. The software is made available to enable more people to buy and use a particular telephone line interface card. Other cards are supported in the software, but the sponsoring company's is obviously supported first.
So, one avenue is to partner with a hardware maker, in the case of the PC to PDA sync, partner with an up-and-coming desktop hardware manufacturer, or a similar PDA maker.
Contributions to properly registered charities are tax deductible. For example, Apache is a 501c3 charity, so it would qualify for a deduction. Contributions to individuals would be gifts and not qualify. There is no tax deduction for gifts. Large gifts must be reported to the IRS by the giver.
Hi Everyone:
I'll probably try to get around to replying to many of your posts directly (will, the really useful ones at least :) ), but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their input thus far, and reply to some of the recurring ideas and themes.
The jSyncManager has, in fact, been around for quite a while. I started working on it back in 1997. It eventually became my thesis project. Shortly after graduating from Brock University, I joined up with IBM, working at their Toronto Software Lab.
At this time, the project was closed source (a bit of a mistake on my part). As with many big software firms, I had to sing the restrictive "IBM owns everything you develop" employment contract, which made continued work on the jSyncManager difficult (this was at a time when IBM was still formulating its rules for employees participating in Open Source projects).
As an in-between solution, I entered into an agreement with my local legal department to offer the jSyncManager through IBM in a co-copyrighted manner, where I retained the copyright to everything as it existed prior to joining IBM. Due to some problems IBM had with the name, it was changed to IBM ManplatoSync for Java. My original agreement was that the project was to be released as Open Source under the IBM Public License -- but while I kept working on the project (in my own time mind you, and for no money), the IBM lawyers kept passing the buck, and permission to actually release the project source to the public was never granted.
After leaving IBM early last year, I decided to dig up the pre-IBM source, fix it up somewhat, and make the jSyncManager Open Source myself.
In the time I've been working on the project, we've had several mentions in the press (Chapter 11 of O'Reilly's "Java Cookbook" mentions the jSyncManager in passing, the May 2000 issue of Java Pro reviewed us against Palm's own CDK for Java (very favourably I might add :) ), and we got a mention in "Assistants", an Australian publication for Chartered Accountants), and I've spoke about the jSyncManager at a few conferences (Wrox Wireless 2001 in Amsterdam, WarpStock 2001 in Toronto, and CASCON 2001 (sponsored by IBM and the National Research council of Canada), also in Toronto). Unfortunately, all of these happened before I released the jSyncManager as Open Source. Things since have been pretty dry (even though IMO we have a much better product now!).
So, we're in a good position to attract attention and funding -- we're a mature project that is rock-solid (we do have to work on our initial setup a bit, as getting end-users to grab all of the necessary third-party libraries we rely upon is curruntly an issue, but it's something we'll work on by creating installer versions that include the necessary libraries once we get closer to our next GA release), and has been received favourably in several communities.
(I do want to note that when I wrote up my story submission, I was quite aware of the potential marketing implications of getting such a story on Slashdot, as some readers here have observed. This wasn't really my intention, which is why I'm trying to ask generic questions to see what ideas every has -- I'm hoping other projects can benifit from this discussion as well. Getting our website /.'ed is an unintended side benifit :) ).
Something I've learned in the six years I've been developing the jSyncManager is that while I'm an excellent coder (well, at least I think so ;) ), and a good project administrator, and while I don't mind blowing my own horn somewhat, I know that I am _not_ a sales/m
SPI is a well run non-profit with tax exempt sttus from the IRS that supports several projects including Debian and the Open Source Initiative.
Read, L
Yes. If you fund your project through the Public Software Fund, anyone who donates money can take a tax writeoff on their US taxes.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist