Funding Open Source?

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?"

Comments

Google Adsense is one option

[Peter Cooper]

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?

Something to at least assist...

[TWX]

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.

An example of this is the various 802.11* projects for different chipsets. Originally .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.

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.

funding via hardware/software symbiosis

[brentlaminack]

Back in my audio engineering days, there was a company that made transformers (hardware). In order to get people to buy their transformers, they gave away schematics (software) of how to build an insanely great preamp using their hardware.

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.

Re:Tax deductible?

[DeepRedux]

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.

Yes: Public Software Fund

[Russ Nelson]

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