Finding Sponsors for an Open Source Project?

vertigo72 asks: "What's the best way to find sponsors for an open source project? Is there some people or foundations that give grants for the development of free software? We develop an open source (GPL) box office software: phpMyTicket. At our knowledge at the moment this is the only open source software of this kind. The program is in advanced beta stage and was already used in production environment by us and by other people. The program is rather complex and big: we support online ticket shop, box office with thermal printer and control at doors with barcode scanner. Smarty, PDF and email template engines are used. Paypal and some other gateways are supported. Now we want to continue and to add more professional features, but alas this requires more funding." "We tried to finance our development ourselves, but that didn't work. We tried support, installation and customization, and also a commercial license, but there are just not enough requests. We also had few donations (to the tune of around $50) via Sourceforge. Now, we searching for alternative solutions like sponsoring. Is there someone out there who can help us to keep the software free?"

Comments

Use fundable

[alien88]

If you know of a group of people who are interested in a feature, try using http://www.fundable.org/ to create a group action.

EG: You have 5 people interested, each person contributes $100, when all 5 people contribute the $100 then the money is unlocked and you can use that to finance the development of the feature.

Re:We really don't care for php applications

[joeldg]

am a python programmer here, but at work we use php, and can tell you from experience writing some monster sites, that php if done right, is just fine for high-end apps. usually your database is the bottleneck, not php.
python is great, but I really prefer php in it's natural environment, alongside apache.

Donations vs funding

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There is a big difference between funding and donations. Funding really means getting someone to commit to paying $xxx for the software to be developed, while donations mean releasing the finished software then asking people to make micropayments etc.

I develop OSS. I was lucky in getting funding up front, but now that the software is shipping and in use there is no funding coming in for ongoing support and maintenance. I asked an OSS developer whether they get any cash from their "begging" on their web page. They say they only get a couple of hundred bucks a year from that.

At the end of the day, people don't pay for what they value. They pay for what they have to pay for. You don't pay for air.

Sometimes you can make some money out of selling non-GPL licenses to your OSS. That only works if you hold all copyrights.

Otherwise, OSS is often very difficult stuff to fund. In part this is due to the immaturity of the user base. People feel cheated if they pay for free stuff. In time, people might come to freely pay for stuff that they benefit from (like the way many people happily pay extra for organic produce: not only because it tastes better but also because it is ethical to support it).