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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?"
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
Cry me a fucking river.
It's called competition. It's something that exists in the Real World.
Seriously, if you have a product that can be replaced in 2 months via current tools, your products value has diminished to the point where maybe you should make a new product.
Hell, if tools are so good that someone can do it in two months, maybe its time for a rewrite of the codebase so you can cut costs and out market, out sell, and out business the "damned kiddie"
If you are so lethargic that a random kid can write something in two months that has the capability to put you out of business, you deserve to go out of business.
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