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?"
The article's idea of "Open Investment" doesn't seem to be about finding ways to fund open-source projects directly, but rather on educating developers on how to become personally wealthy so that they can donate their time to open-source. Or did I misunderstand it?
Anyway, I think Yaztromo just solved his problem #1 - by getting his question posted on Slashdot, I don't think he'll have any trouble marketing his project now, assuming it's any good. I'm interested in #2 as well, though - raising funds to accelerate development. I'm the lead developer of Audacity, and I've been thinking recently of various ways we might be able to raise money to pay a full-time developer:
1. Lots of small donations, targeted at specific features. Simple to set up, but how likely is it that any one particular feature would get enough funding to really pay for its development?
2. Corporate sponsorship - anyone out there successfully gotten a corporate sponsor for an open-source project before? How did you approach them? How much will they try to control how the money is used?
3. Non-profit grant - we could write a proposal to add a large, significant, but specialized feature, such as making Audacity optimized for blind users, or creating a version for kids, and then find an appropriate charityto fund it.
Anyone had luck with any of these approaches? Other ideas?
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
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.
Just my little experience from the POPFile project.
1. Money
All the money I get from POPFile is through donations made through Amazon.com or PayPal. This brings in enough money to keep me *very* interested in the project, although it does not cover the rent at this point. However as POPFile's user base grew I saw donations grow with I would estimate around 10% of users donating an average of $20.
2. Marketing
I spend no money on marketing, but I am *very* nice to any press that want information on POPFile. They are your friend since they will advertise your product for free if you can get them to write about it. The key to getting them to write about it is to think of the "hook" that they will use. All writers have a "hook" or key idea in the story that they are writing about. If you can relate your product to a hook then you can get them to write about it. In the case of POPFile the hook is spam. Although POPFile is designed for generic email processing it's good at fighting spam too and so I work with writers who deal with the spam problem and they in turn mention POPFile.
On a related note I'd say that the free (as in beer) nature of free (as in speech) software is also a big plus for journalists. There's nothing like recommending a product to their readers that is free.
3. Be Nice To People
Word of mouth is very important to any product (commercial or not) and that means answering every single email you get. I read every message in the POPFile forums and answer every email sent directly to me. This is vital because people then realize that the community around POPFile is welcoming and they feel more comfortable using the tool.
John.
Also, by the time you have become 'independently wealthy', you will probably be old, decrepit and be only be able to use the money to pay for a better funeral (or leave it to a bunch of spoilt brats who will spend the rest of their lives fighting each other over the inheritance).
Forget about all this crap. Just get on and live the life you want to live *NOW*. If you want to put more time into developing opensource stuff, just get on and do it, even if it means compromising in other, less important, parts of your life (like being enslaved to becoming financially independent). While you figure out all those complicated plans, your body is busy dying.
I have been thinking on this problem quite a bit lately.
.. ad infinitum (until we cannot split anymore [1 penny] or dependencies run out).
Consider the following:
Company XYZ launches an OSDN like websight that maintains a dependency graph of open-source projects (e.g. FOO project depends on code from X,Y,Z and libraries V,W).
The community can vote on and manage those dependencies and their relative importance. Any entry in the project database only lists it's direct dependencies (which themselves may have others). The system will self-organize and may require some interesting checks and balances but could be done.
The system perhaps begins as a donation website to "donate" to projects that you want to support, but could very quickly mobilize marketing to lobby companies that use projects to donate to those projects, etc...
The company running the website takes a commission from every "donation" or payment. We want this. This incents that company to continue and keeps it in business.
The balance after the commission is split 50% / 50% between the project principals and the dependencies. The 50% going to the dependencies is split according to the voted importance of those dependencies on the project. For each dependency, 50% is taken for that project and the other 50% split amongst it's dependencies,
All proceeds that go to project principals are really just numbers in accounts on the website associated with open-source projects, and while eventually it may make sense to do further breakdowns according to project members, in the beginning, the company running the website could just issue a check on a periodic basis to whomever the agreed-upon organization or person is that is associated with that project.
If you allow this model to evolve over time and provide the company running the website with enough financial motivation (e.g. good commissions), it is highly likely that it would become a mobilizing force for raising funds for projects.
But the best part would be that open-source authors could collect royalty checks for many years for their work, much like book-authors do.
This model may not be perfect, but I think with the right company and a willingness to evolve this basic model into something that fits with community needs, it could become a powerful force for rewarding and compensating open-source contributors.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
What about mixed licensing? Main project becomes a commercial project (with expected enhancments, gui, stability) and feeds back into the pool after so long.
I've been thinking about a similar idea, but instead of mixed licensing, I'd keep the GPL/LGPL mix we're currently using, but sell a version that is wrapped into a friendly installer.
One of the big problems we currently have is that there are a variety of libraries the user requires. Some of these (like jDOM and jUSB) are Open Source, and we can include them. Others (like the Java Communications API) can be redistributed for some platforms, but not for others. Regardless, currently it is up to the users to find, download, and install these pre-requisites before running the jSyncManager. And for some users, this is quite a bit of effort.
I'm currently thinking of creating some pre-packaged installable versions that use platform-specific installers, that include all the libraries we pre-req that we can get free redistribution rights for. These packages could be sold with bundled priority e-mail technical support for a year (or somesuch).
RedHat and others seem to do well with this model in the Linux world, so it could work for us. Making it easier for users to get the jSyncManager running would certainly be an added benifit.
Yaz.