Advice for an Open Source Development Grant?

IgD asks: "My colleagues and I are developing an open source medical records system. A senior supervisor approached us and let us know a third party is offering a decent amount of money in the form of a grant for any legitimate medical research project. We were all but promised the money if we could come up with a proposal. Has anyone in the Slashdot community received a grant for open source software development? Are there any good examples of such a grant available? How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?"

Comments

Damn, fine work

[mao che minh]

You did what a lot of Linux developers fail to do: start a business around services that people really need, and just so happen to use Linux to get it done. In the end, the clients won't really care what is under the hood as long as it works.

My most successful string of open source solutions involved a small break with an audio-video company. I set up a small Linux network, with a small CRM that was based on, believe it or not, a web based PHP driven "application" that I designed to catalogue my DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, games, books, and comic books. mySQL is the backend, Apache its "OS". I added a few useful modules from popular CRMs that I found on Sourceforge. All of this meant nothing to my client, they were only happy that it fit their every need (they were managing customer data, billing, scheduling, and reports across a series of applications like Excel and Quick Books Pro, and good old pen and paper). Needless to say, not only was my solution extremely scalable and cheap, but it removed the hassle of having to have a file cabinet handy and three or four programs. All they did was click a little link on their KDE panel, and up came Mozilla and their portal to my program.

They quickly refferred me to their lawyer's office, my own dentist, and another small business that specialized in boat repair. I quickly made about $12,000 in my spare time, and not one bit of the software I used cost anything. I have yet to return to any of their sites to fix anything since, and this was over a year ago. The only thing I did was give them each a call when Redhat made RHN available so that they could sign up and have their systems updated for them remotely, for very little $$$. The circle of Linux business life eventually brought money back to Red Hat, whom's OS I used for free as an ISO download, at all of these sites.

You gotta love it.

Re:what's the goal?

[barista]

Imho they are very different goals.

Not necessarily. They can get the job done and have open source code. That would probably depend on any stipulations for the grant.

As for the money, I don't know the specifics of their project, but the money could be used to buy computers, equipment, etc. I work for a university based hospital, and have dealt a bit with research proposals, grants, etc. The grants I have dealt with are typically used to pay for things that come up in the course of research, or buys things that the department might not be able to buy on it's own. It might also be used to pay someone's salary, but I'm guessing they're not looking to get rich. As far as who is providing the grant, my guess would be that they want to do a Netscape/Mozilla kind of thing, or they might want make money on installing the systems (service and hardware).

I wish them luck