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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?"
some god damn kiddie does the same thing it took you 4 years to do, in two months and gives it aways for free. Nope. Hobbists always win.
My $2.
Give them a percentage of the enterprise
Give them whatever support they need to raise money regardless of how stupid or irrelevant you personally think it may be
Don't confuse ownership with control
Focus on being rich, not on being king
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
This is actual big problem in certain area since programming skill is almost everywhere.
However the kiddie cannot go on site to install things, the kiddie cannot offer service contract, the kiddie cannot talk to the user professionally, the kiddie cannot document system properly...
If you show professionalism in your 'free' work you can turn it into money and not worry about the 'kiddies'.
-- Dr. Fu Ling-Yu, Internal Technology Consult; Tongji University, People Republic of China.
But seriously, All i've seen in most of the responses is "Get donations! corporate sponsorship!". This is the problem w/ OSS, you can't get something for nothing. I'd like to read some more responses that don't involve begging for money. This isn't a career, it's more of a hobby if you get down to those depths.
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?
:-)
Okay, I have a tiny open source project that no one's ever heard of, but I've been working on it for a few years and have tried various things.
Two parts to this, I guess. One, starting out, requiring a link back (or just asking for one) ends up with a bunch of sites promoting your work. This can raise the public profile of your project, because all the people who see the link and think the app is cool come running over to your project page. There are other ways to do it, of course. (submit to Slashdot anyone?) There's also Freshmeat and other free software directories to get the word out.
I'm really sad to say that the problem with funding, as I see it, is that a lot of the time, the funding just isn't out there unless you have something big and in wide use, like an O/S, or a popular server (Apache, Sendmail, MySQL), or something that is tending toward apps that would be used in a business environment. Also, a really really useful app where an equivalent doesn't exist has the potential to attract funding as well.
You can solicit donations, but my experience is, most of the people who are going to use the application in a serious commercial environment or to help them make a profit donate zip. People who will be using it for personal use and can't afford to donate often donate a couple of bucks. People who demand free technical support because they don't wanna read the manual RIGHT NOW DAMMIT don't generally donate anything either.
Donations aren't generally a good business model.
(Unless you can get tax exempt status...but I digress.)
Really, it seems that one needs a sales manager or an evangelist -- someone who really enjoys going out and *selling* the project. Not in the sense of "buy this software," but in the sense of, "Hey, Mr. Corporation/Investment entity -- if you invest in this it'll be really cool and people will love you and your stock will go up to the heavens! Yay!"
But most of us just want to sit around and code -- the sales thing just isn't attractive. One option I've explored is finding a salesy kind of person I can trust, and asking them to take on that kind of thing for a split of the "take." That has worked pretty well on a small scale, so I'm pursuing it more. If you're a coder who is also salesy, so are extremely lucky and talented. If not, find a buddy and make them do the evangelization.
In the meantime, get a day job and work on your project in your off hours. That's all the funding I've needed so far.
Errm... http://www.linuxfund.org/.
If you can offer service contracts on free software, you can really bring in the money.
There are HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of unemployed LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PERL) guys out there, Peter.
Even a job posting like "10 years minimum SENDMAIL configuration in a 1000+ user environment" will receive HUNDREDS of highly-qualified applicants within hours.
The only people who financially benefit from free software are its users --and only until those tools enable their off-shores competitors to run them out of business. Then the only people who will have financially benefitted will be the off-shores users.
If there is a good commercial product out there that you want to play with (or start your small business with), you should tell the commercial publisher that you are thinking of developing your own version. After assessing your ability to do so (to make sure you are not a business person copying a form-letter out of a Matthew Lesko book) and your inability to justify the payment of their price, they will no doubt hook you up with a free NFR (not for resale) copy to spread the word about their product and to avoid having a free version land in the Subcontinent courtesy of MS and Intel backed OSDN. (It is good for both MS and Intel for the Subcontinent to become as developed as possible in this field!)
Get it? Got it? Good.
Word of mouth advertising is the only real way for an independent project to get off the ground. If you have a good product, then people will use it. You can add lots of momentum by getting hosted by an organization like Apache or Tigris.org.
What it comes down to is having a stable product with a good user-interface, if applicable, good support, good distribution (not just makefiles, but rpms or installer software), good logging, etc.
The perfect book to describe all of this is Luke Hohmann's latest book Beyond Software Architecture, which I would highly recommend. It goes into great detail to explain how to develop software that people will want to use, open source or not.
Anyway, the quality of the product is first and foremost in open-source because advertising money is just not there. Most IT management are not tech-savvy and pay more attention to colorful ads than what the gurus are saying-- which makes it even harder to get the product used. The products that do get used in businesses are typically only the 'standards' like Apache or Sendmail, which have gained industry-wide acceptance.
Computer science as a scientific discipline hasn't exactly been underfunded or anything. This question is a bit naive in that regard. All this boils down to is private and public funding of basic software research and development. As such the usual sources are government entities and large corporate interests. DARPA anyone? IBM, sun, apple, etc all have financial stakes in "open source". Probably what is needed is a streamlined mechanism for applying and receiving these funds but isn't that what CollabNet(sp?) was supposed to be doing? A recent look at their web site reveals them to be nothing more than shills for offshoring/outsourcing though.......
Open source is funded by the parents of college students.
It's pretty funny that the people bitching because they can't get anyone to pay them to write code will turn right around and download some guy's .mp3 and sneer about "greedy artists" and not feel a tinge of hypocrisy.
An interesting idea -- but it's a bit hard to use for a Java-based project (like the jSyncManager), which doesn't require porting to different hardware or OS platforms :).
Yaz.
Every kid and their little sister is writting games these days and the big companies certainly aren't sweating it.
I think the OP was being drastic about "script kiddies" but I often find myself looking for Open Source solutions to replace expensive alternatives.
I think the point he was trying to make was that:
We complain about the lack of jobs available and then go on and on about how great FREE software is. Hypothetical situation Linux takes the desktop by storm, Windows goes down the tubes. Thousands of workers are out of jobs at Microsoft. Not only did thousands of job positions disappear but now you have thousands of people looking for new jobs.
1000+ more people out of work 1000+ less job positions to be filled.
Open Source replaces paid jobs that are covered by the profits created by the product with jobs that need some other way to cover the bills.
Here's the trade-off:
Closed source = few developers but cost of production is distributed over many customers
Open source = many developers but cost of production is distributed over a few wealthy friends
There's plenty of free software floating around but there's not much free money.
If the Open Source model isn't supporting your costs, then you need to start charging the customers. Companies tend to make investments, not give grants. And both are very difficult to get.
Open Source software needs to plan in advance for the possibility that they will need to charge for their product to cover costs. Going out whinning that nobody donated isn't going to fix things.
I liked having a totally free huge web-site that many many people utilized but there was no way I was promising it would stay that way. And of course it didn't. Free is nice but free don't pay the bills.
Project needs money? Charge for the download. Problem solved. If someone else wants to host it and not charge the fee, great. The idea of the charge is to cover bandwidth. If it's not costing you bandwidth then you don't need to get a return on it.
If the problem is more than the cost of bandwidth then you need to find a job that pays real money and work on the project that doesn't pay you on the side.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
- The escrow balance provides a clear marker as to where the donations are, and can have a positive effect on contributions. Consider the Blender situation.
- Contributors can give what they think it's worth to them to have a project (or project milestone) completed, without doing a calculus as to how their donation fits into the overall picture of getting work done.
- Contributors are assured that they will receive their cash back from the escrow account if the project is not completed.
- Developers are relieved from the burden of managing contributions
- Talented developers in developing countries with a spotty track record wrt respect for contract law are not impeded by this reputaton.
- Developers see a concrete pile of cash in an escrow account just waiting for them if they complete the project. There's no ambiguity about getting paid or not.
Funding for Open Source projects is a very interesting subject, IMO. As Free/Open Source software continues its inexorable march into the mainstream, I think it will be crucial to find GRASS-ROOTS methods of funding so that development is not overly influenced by corporate interests and "IP" issues.pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I've been a long time Open Source fan and I have noticed one trend that the movement lacked and still continues to lack on a major scale (although its improving); that is quality assurance. There are many great ideas and excellent programs that I would use, like KOffice, unfortunately it seems that there are very little resources invested in quality assurance. As far as I know, most of the Open Source projects rely on user who submit bug notifications; then these bugs are fixed in future realeases. What about dedicated quality assurance teams that treat any Open Source project like if it were a commercial program? Also, I think that the movement needs more release engineers and testers to ensure less painful installations for people who have very little or no experience with Linux. Do that and watch the numbers of potential users grow.
A big project shouldn't lose half it's revenues for using one tiny library.
Yea, I have been struggling with this myself. But there are some real dangers to doing it differently. Consider:
* If you allow voting or other methods to change the split between project and dependencies based on how many dependencies are used, then there will be more incentive for projects to re-create libraries that they would ordinarily just use. If the split (50/50, 60/40, whatever) cannot change (same for all projects, all the time), then everyone will just accept it and since there is no incentive to recreate the wheel, will use existing libraries - which we want, right?
* On the other hand, uber-succesful projects will grossly over-reward dependencies which may cause some disagreeable things to happen (such as projects writing competing libraries or changing libraries to someone that they like). I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but it would definitely happen. On the other hand, it will create more competition between libraries which will result in better libraries!!
* If you consider that we always use dependencies (often many, many of them), that those dependencies deserve compensation and you realize that getting 50% of something (maybe even alot) is better than 100% of nothing (or a little bit), I think this idea starts to make more sense. Introducing wiggle room in splits would introduce greed into the equation. I think we want to stop that from happening.
Perhaps once a project reaches a certain level of success (e.g. money pouring in), split adjustments should be allowed by the community or perhaps follow some normalized degrading slope to more highly reward that project than it's dependencies. Maybe there could be maturity classifications for projects, each with a slightly different split, and the community could vote on which classification the project falls into. These are definitely the types of issues that would need flushing out.
Ultimately, such a beast would require delicate social management because the methodologies employed to split revenues would have dramatic influences on the manner in which open-source gets developed once such a system was bringing in the money.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving