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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?"
[Obvious] Oh, well the best way to get funding would probably be to get information about your project posted on a high traffic, open source friendly discussion forum. Yea, I'd probably do that first...
Have you tried asking the national theater chains themselves? If you can convince them that this is something that will greatly benefit them and all their branches, they could very well be your best sponsors.
begging for dollars on Slashdot... in other words, Congratulations! Your funds will be arriving shortly, I'm sure.
If someone can buy a thermal printer, hosting, and a barcode scanner, not to mention venue, why can't they pay for their ticket-selling software?
"Hey, can you help me find someone who will give us money to give free help to people charging admission to shows?"
WHY?
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.
I'll go ahead and ask the MBA question. What's the competing commercial product? How much does it cost per year? How much will a theater chain save with your solution? Quantiffy those answers into a simple NPV model and pitch it to execs at theater chains.
If your project is worthwhile enough that a lot of people use it, it will generate some revenue, but open source software only generates large amounts of money for the big guys like Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, etc. Of course, you could just post on Slashdot and the money could come pouring in ... if you have a worthwhile project I state again. Instead, I would recommend going to the companies or individuals that use your program & ask them for donations.
Do what they did back in the good ol' days of the dot com bubble: Come up with an idea that nobody wants, needs, or cares about. Then, create a corporation that has no assets. Write a press release about your product, which doesn't exist yet. Be sure to include a wide variety of terms from the IT bullshit generator. Supposing your company is called Inventri, your press release might begin, "Inventri today announced plans to begin development of its new software product, codenamed Widehorn." Be sure to include plenty of meaningless phrases, such as, "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions." Make sure the bullshit-o-meter explodes. Describe, in colorful terms, how your company provides "solutions," but do not specify what kind of solutions or what they're for. Make sure this is printed on nice glossy paper with lots of whitespace and a variety of high-tech-looking colors. PHBs and other stupid people (hereinafter simply called "management") drool over this kind of crap. Then, a bunch of venture capitalists (hereinafter "rich idiots") will come along and dump millions of dollars on you, hoping to become the next Gill Bates. All you have to do at that point is take the money, buy a fancy office building, fill it with fancy mahogany office furniture, buy all the supplies, like post-it notes, kleenex boxes, refillable pens, and other such stuff, and then hire a bunch of MCSEs, pay them $200,000 a year, and buy a BMW for everyone, including yourself. Make sure your business practices are innovative, such as allowing nerf toys to be used at work, buying lunch for employees every friday, and providing all employees with a paid subscription to Slashdot. When them money runs out and no code has been written, simply close the company and start from the beginning. It's that simple!
What I'm wondering, is, in your business plan, where did you suggest or think that the money was going to come from, and what happened to that revenue stream?
I don't respond to AC's.
"(...) Now we want to continue and to add more professional features, but alas this requires more funding. (...) Now, we searching for alternative solutions like sponsoring. Is there someone out there who can help us to keep the software free?"
...there's no commercial value in the project, but you still want to add features just for the hell of it? That's cool, but don't expect to get paid for it. What's the future of the project if you do not recieve funding? Abandon it so others can pick it up if they want to? Close the source (assuming you have all the copyrights)?
I'm sorry, but if you're looking to get paid for it, you need a project someone is willing to pay *for*. If there was such a sponsoring foundation, I would suggest they use it to replace some central software many people use, like IE/Outlook/Office/Photoshop etc. I would consider spending it on such a niche system like tickets to be a very strange choice.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...of cheap, commercial solutions/services out there for this, but I do think some organizations would want to have this in-house, on their own servers, branded with their look and feel.
I did a lot of ticket solution searching for a non-profit arts organization and never ran across this. Some higher visibility search engine and code repository (hotscripts, etc) entries would help visibility. Visibility will increase the chances of financial assistance.
Although your description was excellent, I feel that it could be beefed up a bit by using the word "synergy" a few times. I've found that companies tend to get an additional 10% venture capital for each time the word "synergy" is used in their mission statement/press release.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Besides getting it posted on Slashdot, you can apply for grants from IBM's research division, and believe it or not MSR (Microsoft Research), so long as the project is able to be used by MS, and open source - e.g. BSD licensed. In the case of the latter, it has to specifically match their interests, whereas IBM are enthusiastic enough about open source to be far more liberal.
;-)
I've had one of my own projects funded as part of my PhD at MIT by IBM. I wouldn't want to let M$ funding anywhere near my code and my Gentoo Linux boxen though
Don't forget the security issues. Once you get involved with tickets sales into any place that deals with scalpers, you start dealing with organized crime and they will own your server unless your always on top of all the php hacks and not all of them get published quickly.
The main difference between a script kiddy playing with a ticking server and the mob doing it is that the scrip kiddy will get a free ticket (so the money doesn't add but) but the mob will end up repricing the tickets they want to scalp.
So, what do you mean by "sponsoring"? what does the person/company get in return? Or, by "sponsor", do you just mean "gullible person with extra money who has no interest in seeing and kind of return on it"?
I don't respond to AC's.
Ask yourself, why should you get the money over another OSS project? Who will benefit from your work, who will want to use it? Why should they pay you to do it?
Work out who, when and why. Then focus on the "data" you pick up. Ring round and ask what the companies themselvs "want" from software and get it done ASAP so you can go "oh yes we have that, we're looking for funding and will offer support to anyone who donates x amount of money (say $500, it's nothing to a company) for 6 months. After that we're unsure of what we'll charge but it's unlikely to be much more. But obviously discounts for any who supported us in the early days".
I like muppets.
By open-sourcing it, you've opened the floodgates. On of the big companies is going to take your code, add a bunch of features,
Troll or not, I'm going to use it as an opportunity to say this:-
If you own the entire copyright to GPLed code, you can do what the heck you like with it, including releasing it under a non-GPL license.
Of course, you can't stop people distributing and expanding the original code under the GPL. And unless you can get the permission of all contributors, you can't "un-GPL" new versions derived from your original base. (This will never happen with Linux because there are too many contributors to make it practical).
But if you (or all the copyright holders on a piece of GPLed code) want to release your original code under a GPL license, you can.
More importantly (this is the point), in such cases, you can add new code, and release that with a *non-GPL* license only.
If you have the original copyright, you can do this. So, if the software is at an early developmental stage, it's not necessarily that big a deal that it's been GPLed. Provided, that is, you have a close-knit group of developers who *all* agree to non-GPL distribution/modification of their code.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This is, try to sell your development services to someone who needs the software you're developing. But instead of selling the software, sell the development and support. Of course you have to state that this is an open source project and that it won't be exclusive to them.
Users of the software can make feature requests (as usual), and you may add things yourself to this wishlist.
For each item, you make an estimate of how much effort it would take to implement the feature, or how much money you'd want yourself to do it. You could use a bidding system to let other developers (freelance, or project contributors, whatever) make a better offer. Note: a $$ amount need not reflect fair compensation for the work involved. Any contributor can have his/her own reasons on why to do it for that money (prestige, fun, interesting, 'will code for food', whatever).
For each item, users of the software can donate or commit to paying -some- amount for implementation of a feature. Likewise, users can apply their own reasons for raising or lowering their rewards. When donations+commitments reach a currently standing offer, collect the money and have the feature implemented.
Think it was a BeOS- or Amiga-related project where I saw this done before, maybe other projects have used this to get things done.
take a look at the source code of Gallery 2 http://gallery.sf.net/ read the coding guidelines, patterns etc. and then come back and report if you'd still say that it's php and not the coder that is the origin of all these php prejudices.
there are other reasons why most php scripts end up being spaghetti code.
What incentive is there to sponsor this kind of product?
Getting your desired features added exactly as you want them, and not having to pay for all the functionality that's already finished (as you would if you were hiring it done ground-up) or feaures funded by someone else.
I own a business, and I love open source software. It has been very useful to me.
I have also spent the past two years developing an application to run my retail/mail order business. I have been able to phase out my proprietary ERP software, and I have asked myself... "should I open source this project?"
Unfortunately, I can't think of a rational reason to do so. Open sourcing the project would allow it to develop faster. But it would also remove my competitive advantage -- it would be like giving my competitors a well-tuned piece of software to make running their business easier.
I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to think of *rational* reasons to open source the project. I'd love the thought of waking up in the morning and reviewing patch submissions from dozens of competent programmers around the world. But wouldn't it be better to, um, hire some programmers to work on the project, and then sell licenses to use it?
It would be better *for society* if the project were open sourced. It would be better *for me* if the project were proprietary.
What kind of business model can you have that allows you to make a living off of writing open source software?
You can "sell support." If you open source a project, and it is successful, then you (the developer and creator of the project) would be undoubtedly the world's number one expert on this software. Businesses wishing to deploy this software would be willing to pay YOU the developer to help install this software. When they had a problem, they would call YOU the developer to fix it. You can charge them nice hourly rates for your consulting.
But a lot of businesses don't trust the open source software model, and I still think you'd be better off if you sold them licenses to use the software *and* sold them support.
If you have a client-server architecture, maybe you could open source one half of the project. Consider open sourcing the server portion of an ERP system. If the project were successful, you would have a huge head start over all your competitors in providing a properietary, for-profit client. But you would need to be specialists in human interface development.
Maybe you could do the reverse, and open source the client. Unlike the Microsoft model, provide a server with a very well-known public API so anyone can develop a client. Provide your client "free-of-charge" under an open source license. Submit a bunch of press releases about how your company is exploiting open source software.
Unfortunately, then you have reduced open source to nothing more than a publicity stunt.
I *hate* to say it, but the best way to really move a project like this forward might be to *close* source the project. You can certainly lowball the competition if you want, but for a mission-critical business application like this, what is really the advantage of open source? A company that earns a profit on the innovation is probably the best model for providing funding for this project.
If you want to do the socially responsible thing AND make a profit, maybe you could investigate dual-licensing. Not-for-profit arts organizations could use your software under a GPL license (and I bet there are TONS of them that would take you up on this). If a commercial for-profit MOVIE THEATER wanted to use your software, on its merits, then sell them a license. You might get the best of both worlds -- essentially for-profit businesses would be subsidizing not-for-profits. AND your developers could earn a living.
set up a small business that specializes in the installation and maintenence of your software, as it would seem that it requires a somewhat specialized hardware/software configuration.
target businesses that could save money by using the open source software, and sell it just like you would anything else.
chances are that most theatres have maintenence contracts with the software vendors they're currently using. They're not going to want to lose that, so you should probably offer that as well.
This has worked very well for projects such as Asterix, a linux-based telephony system.
Your best bet would be to target small independent venues. Chances are that the larger chains run a package they developed in-house.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's always great to hear from the /. peanut gallery of people who don't develop Open Source, who use lots of Open Source, but who don't generally donate any time, effort, or money to Open Source sound off on subjects like this, but maybe you'd like to hear from someone who is running an Open Source software project which does have a sponsor.
My project, the jSyncManager, has had a (somewhat indirect) sponsor for the past six months. Basically, this sponsor (who runs a department at a large University) needed an Open Source, platform neutral solution for synchronizing PalmOS-based handheld systems in the healthcare field, and decided to use the jSyncManager. In turn, they hired me on as a consultant to the project, doing Open Source software development.
This has been useful, as I've been doing Open Source development full time for the past year. It gives me a chance to work on my projects. The output I create for them is Open Source (GPL). And I have some funds I can now use towards the jSyncManager Project. They have also donated resources back to the jSyncManager Project.
I'm not going to get rich off their funding and the resources they've donated (sending me new handheld hardware was a huge boost, for example) -- but it's more than enough to support the needs of the project.
So please take a moment to take a look at their project (TAPAS). I would have continued jSyncManager development even without them, but their support has been a huge help, and has allowed me to do things like eat on a regular basis :).
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Some of my post may have sounded harsh, however I wrote it to help you. I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500, multi-billion dollar company. I have pulled more hair out then you can imagine on the type of software that our PHB's have purchased. It _all_ comes down to PRESENTATION. Some of the "packages" that our PHB's have purchased have been total crap. One of our PHB's spent over $10,000 on a few little Flash demo's (less than 60 seconds each) about how to do basic computer tasks like using a mouse, keyboard, etc! Any graphics dude with about 1-2 months of Flash could have done it. However, the company that sold this "solution" has some business-style and didn't really sell a product, instead they learned what this PHB wanted and made him think he got it!
Learn from this. Make your product as modular as possible. Drop the stupid geek name. What the hell is "phpMyTicket"? Come up with a name that will make some PHB think they are getting a total "ticketing solution". Even if your product is not there yet, make the PHB think it is. Ask the PHB what he is looking for and assure him that your product will deliver (even if it currently does not). This way you get a software sale as well as a consulting sale to "customize" the software for this business.
Good luck!
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I am not sure why you think I am inviting you to nitpick the details, or why you think I am trying to prove something. The only thing that would show what you want would be a detailed case study, which I am not doing. I posted my opinion, just like the poster I replied to posted his opinion. If you want to do a case study on PHP performance go for it, I am sure you can get it posted to slashdot when you're done.
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).
Engineering is the art of compromise.