Who Should Help LinuxFund Distribute $126,155.29?

Roblimo writes "The LinuxFund Web site was down for several months, and the project has essentially been out of business since last year. But MBNA kept the LinuxFund MasterCard going, and kept depositing money in LinuxFund's account -- to the tune of $126,155.29 when NewsForge reporter Jay Lyman finally caught up with the current and former project leaders and found out what was going on -- namely nothing. So does anyone have an idea what to do with this money? Want to suggest an individual or group to take over LinuxFund and run it right?"

Comments

Problems With Undirected Charity

[geomon]

They could give the money back, but it would probably take days to locate individual donors. Because no one would get reimbursed for the time it takes to locate donors (if they can be found at all), the volunteers would essentially be working against the original intent for which the money was given.

Perhaps the money could be used to set up a trust for a scholarship fund. If the trust was set up properly, with the appropriate oversight, it could be a perpetual source of fund for students entering the computer science field.

Now who wants more computer scientists?

Anyone?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to help further saturate an already supersaturated field? Are you some kind of misanthrope that gets schadenfreude from watching other people get their degrees dirty from getting their meals out of a dumpster?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[geomon]

Why would you want to help further saturate an already supersaturated field?

Why would I want to help?

You obviously don't know me very well.

I could care less whether there are too many computer scientists. I am a geologist.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[ePhil_One]

They could give the money back, but it would probably take days to locate individual donors

Sounds like a lot came from a Credit Card affinity program. Giving it back isn't really a reasonable alternative, since the costs to service could quickly surmount the cost being refunded. Perhaps the money could be used to set up a trust for a scholarship fund.

Using the money for a purpose other than the one the fund was set up for is borderline criminal. Whatever the Linux Fund's intent was, that intent should be caried out by whomever takes over.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, nice attitude. But what else should I expect from someone who links to the Cato Institute? I guess geology goes hand in hand with the rocks in your head? Feldspar? Quartz? Basalt?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[PyWiz]

Perhaps instead of providing scholarships for students to get their CS degrees, it could provide money to fund students' research in the field of computer science. I agree, computer science is already an oversaturated field and promoting more CS majors to come and flood the market does not sound like a very good idea. However, funding for computer science projects is always in need, perhaps this money could be given specifically to students involved in projects related to linux? That might retain some of the original intent of the donors as well as make a great contribution to the field as a whole.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the info. I'm passionate about computers and love learning as much as I can about them but have now decided to take your advice and study drama instead.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm passionate about medieval boats and love learning as much as I can about them but have now decided to take your advice and study computers instead.

Look, you live in the most cut-throat whacko society on Earth, that refuses to believe in evolution but preaches survival of the fittest at every opportunity. Why do you think you'll be special in the sea of qualified graduates??

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you agree that CS is oversaturated? You're breaking some young passionate guy's heart!

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

My point is if you choose to study a subject purely based on what you think is most likely to get you a job at the end of it then you're a moron and shouldn't be studying anything.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[PyWiz]

I am that passionate young guy. I don't have a job. I've eaten ramen noodles 6 out of the past 6 days. Beware.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[somethinsfishy]

I've had a Linux Fund card for a good while now. Clerks always say "awwwww what a cute penguin". But that's not why I got it. It was suppose to fund OS projects and encourage the health of the OS movement. Now that it looks like it won't be doing that, I think the best way to use the money to support OS is to ensure the legal right to tinker. OS is a subset of that genre of endevor, So I think the money should go to the EFF.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[drsquare]

Perhaps the money could be used to set up a trust for a scholarship fund.

So with $126k, that just about puts one student through the US university system... I'm sorry if that's a cheap shot but I'm quite surprised at the cost of education in America. Also I apologise in advance for the spelling errors but I'm on my 13th tin and I haven't had a drink in a while so it's hitting me pretty bad.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[chris_mahan]

Dude,

PyWiz as a nick shows you consider yourself gifted with Python.

Unless you're in college or under 18, you ought to be able to find a job easily enough.

Where's your resume anyway?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[swv3752]

As an actual LinuxFund card holder, I can comment on where the money should go. Give it to some Linux related project. I would think it would make sense for OSDL to step up and administer the Fund. Or for FSF step up and administer it (so long as my new card does not say GNU/LinuxFund). Either would be acceptable to me.

Cripes, I would do it myself, but I think one of the existing non-profits would be better for this sort of thing.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[greenskyx]

I have a LinuxFund card as well. I agree, let the OSDL or FSF administer the fund. That seems like a natural action (assuming they would want to manage something like this).

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Unless you're in college or under 18, you ought to be able to find a job easily enough.

I can't speak for PyWiz, but programming and engineering unemployment is at all-time highs. Even the new H-1B visas are not being grabbed up - that tells you how little interest there is in hiring.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[monkeydo]

Given a properly motivated student, I'd put our state system up against the most expensive private schools in the country, and tuition runs a couple of grand each semester. But that's besides the point because a scholarship fund doesn't have to give a free ride. If the money was used to create an endowment, a few grand each year could be given to 5 or 10 students, and the fund could be self-sustaining.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[aklix]

I hate to break it to you, but very few companies actually develop software using Python. Infact, all I've seen running on Python is Open Source projects.

I think the money should go towards helping linux, not directly linux though. This is meant so mean like advertising more so that more end users know about linux. Using Linux is so easy now adays (as long as you use only what comes with your distro/has an RPM for it, and you're hardware is compatible).

The advance towards Open Computing is up to it in standards, we just need publicity. Of coarse I'm far away from a legal expert so I don't know the rules of the game.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[jadavis]

I also have a card and use it actively. I would also very much approve of giving it to the FSF, although I'm not sure exactly what OSDL would do with it. As long as it's spent on real free software that lots of people really use (like GNU or Linux), and not eaten up by administration costs, I'll be happy.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[raehl]

Using the money for a purpose other than the one the fund was set up for is borderline criminal.

A part of the Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws or other organizing instrument of any organization should include what will be done with any assets at such time as the organization is disolved. This is actually a requirement if you want the IRS to recognize you as a non-profit, precisely to avoid having to make that decision after-the-fact. I happen to run a non-profit org, and while what we do has nothing to with activities normally carried out by the American Red Cross, in the event our non-profit must be dissolved all of the assets get donated to them.

If Linuxfund was set up properly, deciding what to do with the money should be as simple as consulting the articles of incorporation or bylws for the organization.

If not, well, the people who donated the money should have taken greater care in selecting the organization they gave it to.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Bellyflop]

I can't speak for PyWiz, but programming and engineering unemployment is at all-time highs. Even the new H-1B visas are not being grabbed up - that tells you how little interest there is in hiring.

Just FYI - the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not agree with your assessment that programming and engineering unemployment is at an all-time high. For more information, visit: BLS Unemployment by Industry for May

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[HTMLSpinnr]

... me too!

As long as it goes to fun viable open source projects with a bright future, but in need of funds, I'm not horribly partial to which group as long as it's well appropriated.

If it does disappear, any idea what MBNA would do with our affinity cards? Revoke them?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[ComputerSlicer23]

(nice nickname by the way...).

Are you saying that the H-1B visa's aren't being applied (or accepted) because enough people aren't attemting to immigrate. If that is what you are saying, I find that relatively shocking.

If you are saying that there are people with H-1B visa's that arne't being hired, that also sounds hard to believe. You must be sponsered by an employer to get an H-1B. If they let you go or you leave, I believe you have 30-90 days to find someone else to sponsor you. If you don't you get deported. Actually, I believe there are two types of H-1B visas, and with one of them you aren't tethered to employment, but I believe they have an incredibly low quota and hence very rare, most people you run into with an H-1B have to be employed. The only reason they are allowed into the country is because presumably they have some set of skills that can't be found by a US citizen.

I've worked with several guys who were H-1B, and they couldn't leave their jobs, and got treated like dirt. Everyone knew they couldn't leave, so just abusing the hell out of them was something for which they had no defense. While a lot of them were eminently employable elsewhere, the hassle of taking over the paperwork kept a lot of employers from hiring them.

Kirby

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the poor CS students are all holding out for a $80,000 a year job. Maybe they should move somewhere with a low cost of living and get the $45-50,000 a year job?

I hate anyone who bitches about not find a job. Suck it up.. find something you enjoy doing, but be willing to compromise. You'll find work.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[stu42j]

"In the case of a change in the endorsed status of a card, MBNA will typically offer the customer the option of transferring the account to either a non-endorsed product, or to one of the 5,000 other endorsed credit cards that we issue."

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[caseydk]

Good call.

Turning this into a free-for-all "what would you do with X dollars!?" is a TERRIBLE idea.

Of course, if they screwed up the Articles in the first place, who knows what will happen?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[jonbryce]

From what I've seen with other MBNA affinity cards in the UK at least, they will replace it with a normal credit card.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[bear_phillips]

I am a linuxfund card holder too. You actually pay a higher rate than normal MBNA cards. I called MBNA and asked about lowering my rate last year. They lowered it, but said I could get even 1 point lower if I dropped the LinuxFund card and went with a standard MBNA card. I kept the LinuxFund card because it gave me warm fuzzies and I get lots of compliments on the penguin ("Oh that is so cute").

From the article it sounds like they don't have any current plans to discontinue the card. The question is do switch to a regular MBNA card or keep the LinuxFund card and hope the money goes to a good cause?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[irabinovitch]

I doubt MBNA would be willing to tell you which cards generated which funds.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[irabinovitch]

Since LinuxFund isnt a 501c3 and the IRS doesn't recognize them as a non-profit they likely were not required to do this.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Just FYI - the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not agree with your assessment that programming and engineering unemployment is at an all-time high.

FYI, an engineer employed as a truck driver does not count as unemployed, nor does an unemployed programmer working as a clerk. Neither do those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but may still be unemployed count in government figures. I can't link to the data I'd like for non-members, but there's (pdf alert) this If you believe everything the government tells you . . . well, nevermind.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

(nice nickname by the way...).

You may be the only person so far to have picked up on the (lame) joke.

Are you saying that the H-1B visa's aren't being applied (or accepted) because enough people aren't attemting to immigrate. If that is what you are saying, I find that relatively shocking.

What I'm saying is that the Congress and USCIS recently put up 20,000 new H-1B visas for people that US companies were really whining that they couldn't find in the US, and so far, there haven't been many takers according to the news sources. Given the lack of IT jobs in the US and the growing IT markets in other countries, it's not really surprising. BTW, shocking as it may seem, the H-1B is supposed to be a non-immigrant visa.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Maybe the poor CS students are all holding out for a $80,000 a year job. Maybe they should move somewhere with a low cost of living and get the $45-50,000 a year job?

I hate anyone who bitches about not find a job. Suck it up.. find something you enjoy doing, but be willing to compromise. You'll find work.

That's what I love about AC posts - all the pontification with none of the worry about it being tied back to the butthead who wrote it.

I know a few recently laid-off programmers who would be very happy with a $45K salary, and they don't live on the coasts. Save the Slashdot bandwidth - ban AC posting!.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[adam1234]

I hate to break it to you, but very few companies actually develop software using Python. Infact, all I've seen running on Python is Open Source projects.

Ever seen Google?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, I'm forced to say this. Posting as non-AC doesn't make you better than anyone else. It doesn't all of a sudden make your points any more valid. I like the AC system. I hate registering for shit. To me, it's no different than the /. masses refusing to register for a NY Times article.

Sure, banning ACs may block some trolls, but a blanket action is ridiculous. Aren't you glad your asenine post is now "tracked" back to you? (Btw, I still wouldn't know who you were, so is there really any accountability?)

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Bellyflop]

Exactly - they are employed. It's unreasonable to believe that everyone who happens to consider themselves a programmer necessarily has the goods to be one. If engineering and programming had larger barriers to entry like law and medicine, it would be a better picture.

But if you believe everything that the IEEE is telling you...well nevermind as well - they have protectionist incentives to paint a bleak picture. I'm trying to find someone whose statistics are not government because you believe in a bias there and not from a trade group because I believe in a bias there. Got any suggestions?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Exactly - they are employed.

Or out of benefits. You've swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. Just because someone takes a certain job to feed their family doesn't mean that they are unqualified to do the job they were trained for. Underemployment is the same as unemployment except to government statisticians who want to make the picture as rosy as possible.

It's unreasonable to believe that everyone who happens to consider themselves a programmer necessarily has the goods to be one. If engineering and programming had larger barriers to entry like law and medicine, it would be a better picture.

There are no government programs designed to import lawyers or doctors, unlike the H-1B which is designed to import programmers.

But if you believe everything that the IEEE is telling you...well nevermind as well - they have protectionist incentives to paint a bleak picture.

The IEEE is an international professional organization. Unlike the ITAA, which is a trade organization that supplies many of the numbers you will see cited in the press. The numbers provided by the IEEE are real numbers. If you can prove otherwise, you will have a real scoop, so please supply your proof.

I'm trying to find someone whose statistics are not government because you believe in a bias there and not from a trade group because I believe in a bias there. Got any suggestions?

Then I'd suggest you google on "Matloff" who is a CS professor in California and has done a lot of work regarding the subject.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Once again, I'm forced to say this. Posting as non-AC doesn't make you better than anyone else.

Yes, I've seen *you* post that before. Posting with an ID makes the user accountable. If you're a troll or an idiot, you will soon be posting at -1 and invisible. An AC can post garbage forever and still post at 0.

Aren't you glad your asenine post is now "tracked" back to you?

Aren't you glad the fact that you can't spell asinine can't be tracked back to you, Coward? As usual, nothing but more AC wasted bandwidth.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[kb9vcr]

I'm also a Linux fund CC holder (good cause and da women, they love the cute animals). The FSF sounds like a good alternative to me too. I'm just glad to hear that some of our money is actually going to someone.

On a side note, did anyone except me not get their plush Penguin? I always wondered about that. Can we vote out $2 so I can get my penguin?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Seigen]

Something like OSDL seems a good idea to me as well. For that matter I wouldn't be opposed to seeing what Linus Torvalds would do with it. If he doesn't know the best areas to focus on then its likely someone he works with does.

One of the weak areas that comes to mind is gaming on Linux. I don't particular care about gaming, but for Linux to eventually gain market dominance people are going to want to play the latest and greatest games on it, so you need to improve cross platform solutions that allow game developers to write essentially one game and run it on their platform of choice.

Again the goal isn't to spread gaming to Linux, but to instead encourage adoption of Linux which will in turn spur more R&D funding. Also the wider user base would encourage hardware developers to write more drivers...

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[MikeFM]

Giving the money back is a bad idea. It was donated for a purpose and it should be used for that purpose. It should fund development of opensource.

I wish I could take over. I've been following LinuxFund since it started and have been a Linux user and free software coder for more than a decade. I have lots of ideas for how to raise more money and how to distribute that money to help opensource. I think myself, or someone similar, should be put in charge of managing the project while the funds should be put in combined trust between that manager and something like the FSF (so that the manager can use the money towards it's stated goal but only with approval from the FSF).

One of the ideas I tried to push with Jerrit in the past was the idea of starting state license plates for support LinuxFund. Have plates available with pictures of Tux and other opensource icons and catch phrases and donate the money earned from users that purchase those plates to LinuxFund.

I also wanted tighter intergration with Freshmeat so that voting wasn't needed. Donate money to the best, non-funded (no Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, etc), projects listed. You can get some useful stats as to how interesting the project is to other users from Freshmeat whereas LF's voting has always been a poor process that gave the prizes to the people who stuffed the ballot boxes.

I'd also like to fund non-coding projects such as creating documentation, artwork for use by OSS projects, etc. There is no reason to wait for people to seek out the money.. just go out and hire people to create what is needed. I've done that with artwork for some of my OSS projects in the past. I'm not an artist so I just paid someone to do the work for me.

Could we change the name though? I'd rather call it the Free Software Fund or the Open Content Fund or something like that.

Maybe Google would be interested in working with LF to co-sponsor projects?

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I also have the same card. When I signed up, I wanted my portion going to Apache if possible.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[drsquare]

Given a properly motivated student, I'd put our state system up against the most expensive private schools in the country,

Yeah, but you know how Americans are, they look down on anyone who went to a state school. It's all about money and status, and you don't get that by going to a state school. Even if you get a degree, good luck getting a job when all the management types went to expensive private schools and want to employ all their mates.

If the money was used to create an endowment, a few grand each year could be given to 5 or 10 students, and the fund could be self-sustaining.

A few questions:
1. What is an endowment?
2. Would a few grand a year even cover tuition costs?
3. How is it self-sustaining? Surely all the money would run out in a few years.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, Hear

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Bellyflop]

Or out of benefits. You've swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. Just because someone takes a certain job to feed their family doesn't mean that they are unqualified to do the job they were trained for. Underemployment is the same as unemployment except to government statisticians who want to make the picture as rosy as possible.

Nor does it mean that they are qualified to do the job that they want to do! That's the problem - underemployment is NOT the same as unemployment. Underemployment is just an opinion a worker has but doesn't take the employer into account.

There are no government programs designed to import lawyers or doctors, unlike the H-1B which is designed to import programmers.

Funny - that's how parts of my family got here. You're dead wrong about that.

The numbers provided by the IEEE are real numbers.

I'm sorry - I just don't believe that.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Underemployment is just an opinion a worker has but doesn't take the employer into account.

Underemployment is what happens when there is an oversupply of qualified workers. The employers in this case are the root of the problem since they are using federal immigration policy to subsidize their operations and create an oversupply of labor.

Funny - that's how parts of my family got here. You're dead wrong about that.

I notice you didn't supply the visa code for this unknown program that imports lawyers.

I'm sorry - I just don't believe that.

I'm not surprised. Like the rest of your opinions, it's based on what you want to believe instead of facts. The IEEE and the ACM are the two most highly regarded IT professional organizations in the country, whether that fits in with what you want to believe or not.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Nutria]

Maybe the poor CS students are all holding out for a $80,000 a year job. Maybe they should move somewhere with a low cost of living and get the $45-50,000 a year job?

I hate anyone who bitches about not find a job. Suck it up.. find something you enjoy doing, but be willing to compromise. You'll find work.

And if you are so philosophically pure that you'll only work on OSS platforms, so be it. That's just more work for those of us who deign to sully ourselves working on and with proprietary systems.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Bellyflop]

Underemployment is what happens when there is an oversupply of qualified workers. The employers in this case are the root of the problem since they are using federal immigration policy to subsidize their operations and create an oversupply of labor.

Qualified workers.

I notice you didn't supply the visa code for this unknown program that imports lawyers.

They are doctors - in case you hadn't noticed, our country needs them. But now you're just being rude. If you can't discuss something in a civilized manner, then, well it's not my job to raise you.

I'm not surprised. Like the rest of your opinions, it's based on what you want to believe instead of facts. The IEEE and the ACM are the two most highly regarded IT professional organizations in the country, whether that fits in with what you want to believe or not.

Your opinions are based on what you wish to believe as well. You seem to think there's some government conspiracy so that the BLS can't be trusted after all.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Qualified workers.

Yes, that's what I said, "qualified workers." Please pay attention.

They are doctors - in case you hadn't noticed, our country needs them. But now you're just being rude. If you can't discuss something in a civilized manner, then, well it's not my job to raise you.

I supplied the visa codes relevant to my argument. You have still not provided a visa code or the name of your supposed program. If you think it's rude that I don't blindly accept your fabrications, then so be it.

Your opinions are based on what you wish to believe as well. You seem to think there's some government conspiracy so that the BLS can't be trusted after all.

It doesn't require a lot of thought to realize that people don't suddenly lose their education, experience, and knowledge just because they run out of unemployment benefits. That's what the government's metric is - when people run out of benefits, they're no longer unemployed. I suppose you also believe the government's inflation numbers although they don't include prices the feds have deemed volatile or seasonal. You need a serious dose of skepticism and some training in critical thinking.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[jrockway]

Yeah, I've seen Google. Where's the python?

(And BTW, the GP said "very few companies". Google is one company out of millions. That's very few.)

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[Bellyflop]

Ok, continue with your conspiracy theory. I'm sure the tin foil hat fits tightly.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[adam1234]

All over the place. Quite a bit of Google's experimental technologies are powered by Python. Of course, most of the time it isn't obvious since it just spits out an HTML page. Occasionally you'll see ".py" in the URL. Do a google for "Google Python" and you'll find some more about the connection.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[jusdisgi]

As an actual LinuxFund card holder, I can comment on where the money should go. Give it to some Linux related project.

Holy Shit! That's BRILLIANT!!!! Thank God we had an actual LinuxFund card holder on hand to come up with this incredible plan!

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I agree, computer science is already an oversaturated field and promoting more CS majors to come and flood the market does not sound like a very good idea.

I did CS because I enjoy the subject area, not because I wanted to land "phat loot", or even a CS job ( although that's the way it worked out ). Surely I'm not the only one?

-- YLFI

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I supplied the visa codes relevant to my argument. You have still not provided a visa code or the name of your supposed program. If you think it's rude that I don't blindly accept your fabrications, then so be it.

Does this help at all? Physicians have been able to practice on the H-1B since 1990. Check out Miscellaneous Technical Immigration and Naturalization Amendments, 1991.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Ok, continue with your conspiracy theory. I'm sure the tin foil hat fits tightly.

That's it? That's your final response to all the points in the argument? You haven't refuted a single point or offered any evidence in support of your claims, except to say, "I don't believe it." I don't wear a hat of tin-foil or any other persuasion. A half-century of learning and observation has taught me to believe in the actions - not the claims - of any entity. As Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." It's a shame so many youngsters are willing to give up their liberties. Sleep well, knowing that the government is looking out for you while it's reneging on agreements made with your parents and grandparents in their "tin foil" hats.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[vsprintf]

Does this help at all? Physicians have been able to practice on the H-1B since 1990.

A bit late to an old discussion aren't you? In any case, the H-1B does not grant foreign doctors an authorization to practice medicine in the US unless they graduated from a US medical school. Otherwise, they are subject to the accreditization rules of the relevant licensing bodies.

Programmers (and fashion models) are authorized to work at will as long as they have an employer. If H-1B programmers had to pass a proficiency test before they were admitted, there would be far fewer of them - I know, I've had to train a few.

Re:Problems With Undirected Charity

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

A bit late to an old discussion aren't you?

I don't even live in your country. I just happened past the thread and thought I'd throw it in.

YLFI

A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

Oddly, neither the website or the news story goes into any detail of what LinuxFund *is*. i.e. I assume the money comes from special credit card programs, but the site doesn't seem to explain how it's used. Is the money put toward internal developers on the project or is it used to provide grant money to OSS projects? Can anyone fill in the details?

IHMO, the best organization for something like this is for LinuxFunds to be an administrative entity only. Proposals for Open Source software and funding requirements could then be submitted to the project for review and potential approval. Selected OSS projects would receive the funding they requested according to the payment schedule that was approved. This payment schedule would allow LinuxFunds to track the progress of a given project, and make adjustments as necessary. (Potentially even cutting off funding if the project is not viable.)

Such an organization would require only a few knowledgable employees to make the decisions and administrate the funds. With funds transfers being what they are today, much of the grunt work (transfer, accounting, etc.) could be done automatically. Since this is a publicly supported organization, it should publish a detailed accounting of its usage of the money.

To put things in perspective, the current funds of $126k work out to about 5,250 man hours of work at ~$24/hr (~$50,000/yr).

That's my thoughts anyway. :-)

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

Ok, I've dug a bit deeper and it appears that the site is designed close to what I've described. Primary differences seem to be:

• Developers are expected to become staff members.
  
• The funds distribution seems to be more focused more on "hiring" rather than individual project proposals.
  
• I can't access it at the moment, but it seems that the decision on a developer/project is made by an online chat rather than a small panel. (Nothing wrong with the idea of public review, though.)
  
• They don't seem to *pay* fair market value for developers and administrators. I'm sorry, but if you're only drawing a salary of $28k, you're probably going to have to find something else to support yourself. A salary closer to $50k would have made a better baseline, with consideration given to circumstances.

Re:A few thoughts

[hswerdfe]

Because its "LinuxFund" not "OpenSourceFund", I say give it to a Kernel Developer, to work full time, for a few years.

Re:A few thoughts

[irabinovitch]

LinuxFund is a non-profit organization in the state of Oregon. Funds come from affinity cards LinuxFund has setup through MBNA. They get paid for signing you up as well as fraction (a very small fraction) of every dollar you spend using the card.

They were using these funds to provide grants to the free software community. They have had "interns" which work on individual open-source projects, but mostly they offered grants and microgrants to OSS developers who needed funding to work on a specific project. For example Software Suspend recieved some funding as well as XIPH.ORG. They've also sponsorsed community organizations such as CodeCon and the Southern California Linux Expo when they were first starting out.

According to public records they were bring in revenues between $100K to $200K per year at their high point. Its definately a viable model for funding open-source projects it just looks like its in need of volunteer support.

Re:A few thoughts

[hackstraw]

I actually have one of these cards. Its a cute Tux penguin on a mastercard. I got it because it had Tux on it and it was supposed to fund Linux development in some way, but I was never clear on the details. I rarely ever use that card anymore after MBNA (the backing bank) pissed me off. They had the nerve to try and convince me that they could incur interest in a balance that was greater than any given balance on any given day for that whole billing period. I called them and they could not explain the charges whatsoever, so they took them off. I normally pay my CC off every month, but this particular month I was a little shy on cash, so I paid the minimum until I was paid 2 or 3 days later, and then I immediately paid it off.

If you don't pay off your CC every month, you will never truly be able to tell what they are billing you for, but if you normally do pay it off, read the bill very carefully. You could be very surprised.

Re:A few thoughts

[Daniel_Staal]

So, we need to set up an organization/council to do the distrobution. A handful of people the Linux community trusts, who will agree to volunteer (probably for a small stipend) to evaluate proposals and say who gets which money.

The people would need enough techincal background to tell when someone's blowing smoke, and enough legal/finacial background to actually handle the money.

So: Suggestions? I'd nomiate myself, but no-one would take me seriously.

Linus is probably too busy. Stallman, too political. EFF? Heads of Red Hat/SuSE/Yellow Dog/Knoppix?

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

They have had "interns" which work on individual open-source projects, but mostly they offered grants and microgrants to OSS developers who needed funding to work on a specific project. For example Software Suspend recieved some funding as well as XIPH.ORG.

This really is a good idea. The government gives out quite a bit of funds, but usually only for projects that meet military, community development, or pork projects required by congress.

According to public records they were bring in revenues between $100K to $200K per year at their high point. Its definately a viable model for funding open-source projects it just looks like its in need of volunteer support.

Why do they need volunteers? From the sound of it, all they really need is better administration. Also, it sounds like they have run afoul of a common mistake in OSS funding: underfunding the project. I know most people don't realize it, but even a non-profit entity can't operate if it doesn't have 100% attention from its administration. Which usually means that the administators of the money must be payed a fair market salary. A lot of people feel funny about this (since they feel that it's not "their" money), but it makes a big difference to the quality of time an individual can put into their work.

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

As an original cardholder, I've run $20k/yr into this card, which at 1.5% means they've gotten $300 a year from me for the last five years.

I would like my $1500+ to go to:

Apache
Asterisk
Fedora

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

A handful of people the Linux community trusts, who will agree to volunteer (probably for a small stipend) to evaluate proposals and say who gets which money.

Volunteers are a *bad* idea for core operations. What you need is one or two full time administrators (with full time pay!) who can manage the funds. They would be responsible for setting goals for the funds, placing submitted proposals out for public review, and then making a final decision on whether a proposal will receive funding or not. During the period of public review, OSS developers/members may feel free to add their comments and/or votes, thus influencing the administrator's decision. :-)

Re:A few thoughts

[Daniel_Staal]

I actually agree with you. I said volunteers for practical reasons: This fund has been accumulating for a year, and has only raised $125k. With full-time pay that probably ends up with only $20k for developers. Split that a couple of ways, and all of a sudden we're not really talking about any money. (And that's assuming you don't have to pay anything but salaries.)

Of course, it is possible that acutally having people run the fund will enable it to grow faster.

Whether this should be volunteers or full-timers is really dependent on this: How full-time is the organization? At the moment, not very. Maybe that should be changed; maybe it shouldn't. How likely is it to grow?

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm..they could give it to FreeBSDFoundation.org :-)

Re:A few thoughts

[vrimj]

Why make people find the money and apply. Good community projects are known in the community. Use it to create a computer version of the MacArther prize- use geeks who remain secret but use stuff to nominate people. You could even let the card holders vote on the finalists. The problem seems to be that this was structured to have way more adminstrative overhead then it needs.

Re:A few thoughts

[swv3752]

There are two non-profit organizations ideally setup to handle this. One is FSF and the other is OSDL. FSF is actually a better choice as they are more closely aligned with the goals of LinuxFund. If FSF would leave the name alone, i would whole heartedly support them.

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

I actually agree with you.

Glad we agree. :-)

I said volunteers for practical reasons: This fund has been accumulating for a year, and has only raised $125k. With full-time pay that probably ends up with only $20k for developers.

Actually, you need to look at it from the perspective of fewer, but higher quality, projects. Since they don't have too much money at the moment, one administrator makes the most sense. We'll say he makes a salary of ~$50,000/yr. It's not an amazing amount, but should be sufficient for a comfortable living outside of a major metropolitan area.

That leaves the admin with about $76,000 to give to projects. Obviously, actual funding levels for projects would depend on the individual project, but it's enough money to fund three developers (potentially on single developer projects) for 6 months each. (again at ~$50,000/yr) The administrator would want to stagger these projects, of course, so that he doesn't burn up the funds in a short period of time.

During that year, it would also be the admin's job to promote the LinuxFunds project, thus raising more capital for future ventures. This makes the projects he chooses very important! It is critical to future funding levels that the early projects produce noteworthy work. If consumers can look at a piece of work and say "LinuxFunds made that happen!", then they'd be more likely to assist in future funding. To that end, it may make sense for the admin to earmark some (but not too much!) of the funds to advertising budgets. e.g. An artist to create logos/buttons for LinuxFunds receipients to use on their webpages.

Re:A few thoughts

[feargal]

To put things in perspective, the current funds of $126k work out to about 5,250 man hours of work at ~$24/hr (~$50,000/yr).

Christ, have you people learned anything? Out-source to India, Russia, or China; you should be able to get at least three times as many man-hours out of it.

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

Christ, have you people learned anything? Out-source to India, Russia, or China; you should be able to get at least three times as many man-hours out of it.

That is a REALLY bad idea for a non-profit entity. For one, going international can create all kinds of legal complications. You have to be *very* careful about this. For another, outsourcing places barriers between the people who are giving the money and the people who are receiving it. Those barriers aren't going to help much in getting future funds.

Re:A few thoughts

[golgotha007]

I couldn't agree more. I have had my Linuxfund MBNA card for nearly 4 years now and use it extensively (it's my #1 used credit card). It's amazing to see how many Finns recognize Tux while traveling thru Finland :) It has also helped me land Linux related sysadmin contracts by flashing it at IT managers during an interview.

That said, and considering that a tiny percentage of that money was donated by me, I also vote that this money should go towards Linux kernel development.

Re:A few thoughts

[DavidTC]

I don't think it makes sense to hire 'developers' unless they have specific important skills.

I think what makes more sense is bounties.

Actually, what makes more sense would be cleverly purchasing a few important software patents and licensing them to OSS only, with cross-licensing available to companies that cross-license with OSS.

Re:A few thoughts

[AKAImBatman]

I don't think it makes sense to hire 'developers' unless they have specific important skills.

Presumably, a given proposal would base its cost estimates on full time work from the developers of the proposed project. That's where the developers come from. :-)

I think what makes more sense is bounties.

Bounties are tricky. Yes, they provide incentive, but only for things that are easy to do. If you want something that's difficult (e.g. Working sleep mode for Linux) then you need to pay the price for full-time developer.

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS != Linux. I would expect a name change then. I write OSS, but could care less about Linux.

Re:A few thoughts

[irabinovitch]

LinuxFund only recieves a small percentage of the transactions you make. MBNA tells me its somewhere between .5 and 1%.

Re:A few thoughts

[irabinovitch]

They've actually supported work on BSD projects in the past. Its called LinuxFund but the goal was improving F/LOSS in general.

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to add to this, an employee's salary is something like half the cost of having an employee. This may be fine for contractors, but then they're supposed to pay their own taxes and take care of their own benefits. So, your numbers aren't exactly accurate.

Re:A few thoughts

[Grendel Drago]

What sort of patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? What sort of useful patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? Do you have any idea how much it would have cost to get the rights to LZW? Or how much it would cost now to get the rights to arithmetic coding? MP3?

And isn't raising artificial barriers to integration something that the other guys do? We're supposed to be all about interoperability, aren't we? Winning on merit, and all that?

--grendel drago

Re:A few thoughts

[Pxtl]

Come on, why not handle this democratically? It would be too technically difficult to weigh the cards properly by expenditures, but you could give 1 cardholder 1 vote and then simply vote dollars into projects. Each year, just have the site accumulate proposals, and then have the cardholders vote dollars into the proposals at the end of the year.

Re:A few thoughts

[DavidTC]

The point is to introduce something that prevents others from breaking interoperability, like, oh, Microsoft.

The ideal solution is, of course, to not have any patents, and maybe if MS can't use them against us, maybe they'll come out against them.

I don't know what useful patents could be gotten for $150,000. Probably one from someone partial to open source.

You can count on me

[waynegoode]

Uh, I volunteer to help distribute the money. Just deposit it in my PayPal account and I'll take care of the rest.

obFSF

[rkcallaghan]

Let me start out with the obvious, how about the FSF? Maybe see if one of their lawyers could be a trustee?

~Rebecca

Re:obFSF

[Otter]

Naw, Stallman would just furiously denounce them for not calling it "GNU/LinuxFund".

Me, I'm thinking this dilemma just cries out for a reality show...

Re:obFSF

[rczik]

What she said.

r

Re:obFSF

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm... lawyer and trustee used in the same breath - has lightening struck yet?

Re:obFSF

[Seumas]

But good communist hippies have no need for the money of a capitalist-pig society!

Re:obFSF

[irabinovitch]

As a card holder I'd be ok with the FSF taking over, however I'd be conserned they would only support projects that are GPL'd and not projects released under the BSD license.

Re:obFSF

[wohlford]

Nah. After the Slashdoting, it all goes to pay bandwidth costs!

Re:obFSF

[vsprintf]

But good communist hippies have no need for the money of a capitalist-pig society!

I suppose the battery in my humor detector may need recharging, but it doesn't seem very funny, and some comment like this is always posted whenever the topic of OSS comes up.

There were plenty of capitalist musicians who made money before the advent of the RIAA. There are plenty of capitalist coders who make money either by writing OSS or by using OSS for in-house software/systems which support money-making operations and their own salaries. Anyone who believes that all software should be produced by Microsoft or any other for-profit company is not a capitalist - they're a card-carrying idiot.

Re:obFSF

[Jim Hall]

The FSF is a good candidate. I looked into that once, when people kept asking me how they could donate money to the FreeDOS Project. I asked Richard Stallman if the FSF would be willing to accept donations that would benefit FreeDOS projects. This was his reply (be aware of his conditions):

This sort of thing is possible, and within our charter. I think we would have the responsibility to supervise the spending of the money, to make sure it was spent in a legitimate way on FreeDOS development and not siphoned away to something else.

Also, if we do this for you, we would want to ask you to help us out in little ways--for example, if you mention in FreeDOS materials the system people often call "Linux", we'd like you to call it "GNU/Linux". And we'd ask you to use the term "free software" preferentially rather than "open source".

The "little ways" thing ("GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux") would probably not be such a little thing for some people, if the $126,155.29 were donated to them for the FSF to distribute.

Re:obFSF

[Seumas]

I wasn't commenting on the topic of OSS. I was commenting onthe topic of Stallman. :)

Re:obFSF

[Audacious]

Or maybe to help out in the many EFF cases?

Re:obFSF

[vsprintf]

I wasn't commenting on the topic of OSS. I was commenting onthe topic of Stallman. :)

Okay, I guess I'm dense. I don't recall Stallman as being opposed to making money from writing sofware - I believe that's what he does, but I'm willing to be enlightened.

Re:obFSF

[TopSpin]

Maybe see if one of their lawyers could be a trustee?

Perhaps the FSF could use the cash to begin a its own investment fund. Raise 35M USD, buy 51% of SCOX, fire that nest of bastards, put Linus and Stallman on the board and make every patent, copywrite, source file and document they own public domain.

If this was done I would personally invest a couple grand and then, forever after, insist that it be known as GNU/Linux.

Ah, wishful thinking. Happy Friday.

Re:obFSF

[PeterPumpkin]

Selling Free Software

It doesn't look like RMS is opposed to making money off software, nor making money off free software.

He's saying "software should be Free", not saying "software should be free", eh?

Re:obFSF

[vsprintf]

He's saying "software should be Free", not saying "software should be free", eh?

Yup, sounds like a capitalist with a principle to me. :) If only there were more of them.

Uhm... Me?

[erroneus]

How about giving it to me... I'm behind on a few bills, just got married, could use a new car, thinking of buying a house...

Re:Uhm... Me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar...no one would marry you...

Obvious

[rackhamh]

I hear Bill Gates needs some assistance with his open source initiatives.

Re:Obvious

[GIL_Dude]

Nah, the founders of the site should take the money and run; just like other scams...

Missing change

[DarthVeda]

So THAT'S where all the tenths of a penny in my company's accounting software have gone!

Re:Missing change

[lbmouse]

Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

Re:Missing change

[rackhamh]

Actually, somebody at LinuxFund made a rounding error. Tomorrow we'll learn that the entire building has burned down (except for a red stapler that miraculously survives), and that weird mumbling guy in Corporate Accounts has gone missing.

Re:Missing change

[Thud457]

Sorry, Richard Pryor playing a computer geek trumps David Herman!!!

Re:Missing change

[zamboni1138]

You're thinking of Superman 3, not 2.

Re:Missing change

[zombie-m]

This is not a mundane detail, Michael!

Exiled Nigerian Royalty are firing up their email.

[Bamafan77]

I suggest the MBNA save themselves the complication and go ahead and post that account number here and let it be a first come, first serve free for all.

obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

donate it to the "Microsoft better OS" fund. competition is good.

Who should NOT take it over...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone but Stallman, please!

Re:Who should NOT take it over...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want Stallman to take it over?

You do realise the way you phrased your title gives that impression.

Sell Wristbands and sue SCO

[nev4]

I say we start selling wristbands (a la Livestrong and One) and then use the $126k and the wristband money to file absurd lawsuits against SCO intul they go out of business...

What a clusterfvck

[winkydink]

Boy it sucks to see how poorly this was run. :( "Nothing has come out of these accounts for months, save about $250/mo auto deducted for telecommunications expenses," Collord wrote. "I went off payroll in June of 2004 when I stopped working full time on this project and haven't incurred any expenses since. I was paid a salary of I believe like $28k per year. I haven't read my LinuxFund email since about January I believe." $28k/yr. $14/hr. I'd say that's about the quality level the fund administration appears to have received. "I'm certainly negligent," he said. "The short story is: the scale at which the business model seems to work is not commensurate with the overhead required to run a nonprofit well. Everyone that's been involved has been lackluster given the range of requisite skills -- technical and administrative and business development in total -- and ultimately burnt out." Try hiring a good business person. I'll bet you won't even need him/her full-time. In fact, you might be able to get somebody from SCORE very cheaply. Get interns with a biz background. You don't need geeks to administer the fund. You only need them to decide who gets what.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[hal9000(jr)]

$28k/yr. $14/hr. I'd say that's about the quality level the fund administration appears to have received.

Yeah, that's about par for a small non-profit. Small non-profits are really run by people who believe in what they are doing strongly enough to work very, very hard for very little financial return. Get into larger ones in terms of revenue, and payroll tends to increase, but usually no where near comparable to what you can make in the private sector.

As for what should be done with it? Money donated for a cause must be used for that cause, so there yah go. Find that out and there is your answer.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[DaveJay]

Indeed. My wife ran a not-for-profit for two years, supporting and encouraging local filmmakers, and the total amount of $ pouring through never came anywhere close to this amount -- yet she and her team loved running it, the local filmmakers got a surprising amount of support, and it was all good.

I suspect these folks perhaps started the fund with the best of intentions, but also with the assumption that they'd be able to make it their day jobs; if you go in with that kind of view, you're bound to be disappointed.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[Anonymous Coward]

I know someone that works for a small non-profit organization. Not as small as this apparently nonexistent organization, but small for a non-profit organization that, you know, actually does something. Anyway, the administration of said organization receives as compensation 112-151% of the local average income which is far in excess of $28k/y, plus there are "investors" where money from the non-profit is "invested" into services provided by these "investors" or by their holdings. Quid pro quo. Other benefits for the administration and their "investors" include the use of regularly purchased new cars (bought from "investors'" car dealerships), computers, expense-paid trips and so forth.

Anyway my friend works in

Re:What a clusterfvck

[Kiryat Malachi]

Not sure what the hell kind of non-profit you're talking about, but all the ones I've worked with, 24k was entry level (this was in SE Michigan, where 24k will let you survive; not well, but survive) and the president of the agency (mind you, the top administrator for a 400 full-time employee non-profit) made 80k at one, and (for around 600 employees) 100k at the other. Oh, and they were provided with a leased company car, on a 36 month lease, so maybe tack an additional 3k per year onto that. (They were generally cars on the order of a Chevy Malibu or Ford 500, and GM/Ford gave them at supplier discount.)

80k for running a 400 employee company is by no means above scale for the area.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[jdray]

[sarcasm]

$28K per year? Sounds about like a schoolteacher's salary. And you know how lackluster and unskilled they are. Not to mention how quickly they burn out. I mean, sheesh, can't they drum up enough funds for someone as brilliant and skilled as a $100K per year IT department manager. Then you'd see things happening.

[/sarcasm]

Re:What a clusterfvck

[magarity]

Get interns with a biz background. You don't need geeks to administer the fund. You only need them to decide who gets what.

Heck, I have a business degree AND I'm a geek. I'd be happy to administer the thing; 100K can make 5k to 10k per year in capital gains and interest. That would be a nice little grant for a couple of open source projects per year. I think that's much better than handing out the money in one swoop and then it's gone.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[AKAImBatman]

I know you're being sarcastic, but $28k really is far below a single livable income for anyone other than a single student. That includes areas where living costs are far lower. Upping the salary to $40-50k/yr would allow the administrator to fully focus on the job at hand without paying anywhere near what the private sector would pay. Remember, this job wouldn't include things like life and medical insurance. That would have to come out-of-pocket. Teachers don't have that problem, and usually have decent retirement packages waiting for them. (FWIW, though, teachers *are* underpayed. The question, however, is where in the world is that $20,000 per student per year going to?)

Re:What a clusterfvck

[dasunt]

Thank God that is sarcasm. The average starting schoolteacher's salary is $30k according to http://www.aft.org/salary/2003/download/2003Table2 .pdf.

The average salary of a teacher is about $44k, according to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm. Not bad for a job where the outlook is good to excellent, with employment in most locations and a high measure of job security and decent benefits. Plus there are three months of vacation.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and most teachers have another side job for the three months, wich is additional income not counted in the figures you mention. And then they have unions with plenty of health care, etc. benefits.

Here in Oregon, the teacher's union is so strong it provides marching orders to the state but at the same time whine and cry about how 60% of the state budget just isn't enough for them.

The public school system in Oregon is a money-sucking black hole. I desperately hope it caves in so that parents will take a good look at where they really should be going for qaulity education (hint: it starts at home).

Um, sorry you hit my hot button.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[vsprintf]

I mean, sheesh, can't they drum up enough funds for someone as brilliant and skilled as a $100K per year IT department manager.

Absolutely right. With a normal IT Dept. manager, they wouldn't have to worry about what to do with the funds. First, they wouldn't have any funds. Then they would have to figure out how to pay for the cost overruns and the three assistant department managers. And the donuts, and the office party, and the management awards and bonuses.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[Jellybob]

Someone give this person the job - it's the first sensible suggestion I've seen in all the comments.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[MichaelKVance]

Cox himself is quite the character. He was involved in the disintegration of Loki Software, actually, although I'm not sure the story has ever been told.

But if you buy me some beer maybe I'll tell you ;).

m.

Re:What a clusterfvck

[jdray]

You work here too? Where's your cube? ;^)

Re:What a clusterfvck

[magarity]

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I suppose I should have been more specific in my original posting. I offer to:
1. Register a 501c3 to hold the money.
2. Invest the money conservatively (I already am president of an investment club handling 1/4 the amount in question)
3. Maintain a website where I will post on a monthly basis my investment choices and the current balance
4. Collect grant proposals for open source projects and post the best looking ones annually to slashdot for a vote on who gets how much of the year's proceeds.
5. Do it for no fee for myself; It'll make a great resume item. Note: no fee for or TO myself; any costs to administer the thing will be charged to it. Ie: mailing checks to the recipients of grants, stock transaction fees, 501(c)3 registration fees, etc.

Licenses

[Anonymous Coward]

That would buy 180 SCO licenses, with a few hundred dollars left over.

Give to one of those African Princes trying to get

[homerules]

their inheritance and get more money in return. Then give it away, I am sure it will work.

If I were to manage the money...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would promenently display the Linux Penguin on my new Ferrari - showing the world how cool open-source can be.

Google summer of code runner up

[diginux]

Me and a few others are trying to setup a website so that people who get rejected from the top 200 in google's summer of code have a place to go where they can still make their ideas a reality. It is going to be a place where they can get support from other fellow programmers, and keep track of their own as well as other's progres. Kind of a watch each other's back type deal. It would be nice to have some money to give rewards to people that do accomplish something, and I think this would be a great way to donate some of the funds! Of course, I am little biased, since I am one of the people trying to get the program going!

Re:Google summer of code runner up

[Anonymous Coward]

URL?

Re:Google summer of code runner up

[Anonymous Coward]

What about recent grads which would like to get involved? I just graduated a year ago and I'm unsure how to get involved with an open source project. Is there anyway to know which projects are recruiting people? Is there a list somewhere?

Before everyone says sourceforge, there are A LOT of projects with no activity and its unclear which of the projects that are active are looking for new programmers.

Re:Google summer of code runner up

[3770]

Over the years many projects will end up having no activity.

Sourceforge, while having many issues, does make it easy to see which projects that has activity.
See this link for activity ranking: http://sourceforge.net/top/mostactive.php?type=wee k

There is also a system to advertise for programmers. http://sourceforge.net/people/

I'd say that the grand parent is, however fun and however nice the thought is, is misdirected energy.

Help make SourceForge better instead.

You say that you are unsure how to get involved with an open source project. Have you tried the obvious of contacting one of the developers in a project that you find appealing?

Something useful

[mattyrobinson69]

find something wrong with gnu or linux, (kernel, desktop, X, whatever), pay people to fix it.

could be spent doing up X, KDE or Gnome, pay people to check security (and fix) in popular software such as openssh, linux kernel, etc.

spend it on software development

Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[winkydink]

He already runs a successful business.

He's not afraid to make controversial decisions and stand behind them (something one is going to need when one decides to donate to Project X and not to Project Y).

Re:Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[squiggleslash]

He already manages the funding of various projects, so it'd simply merge two potentially diverse funding sources. We don't really need or want that. Different mindsets are good.

Re:Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[mogrify]

Yep, every so often he could come into the office, see if any money needed distributing, take care of it all, post it on his blog, and go away! :)

Re:Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Save a few K: echo "main(){}" > true.c && gcc true.c -o /bin/true

Your sig is wrong, on my Linux box I get 16 in $?

This works and only takes 715 bytes total size compiled:

echo -e '.globl _start\n_start:\nmovl $1, %eax\nxorl %ebx, %ebx\nint $0x80' > true.S; gcc true.S -nostdlib -o /bin/true

Re:Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[Q2Serpent]

Here's a /bin/true in 11 bytes (I guess I'm cheating since I'm using another binary, but what system needs /bin/true but doesn't have /bin/sh?)

#!/bin/sh

-Serpent

Re:Ask Paul Vixie to run it

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Here it is in 8 bytes or 7 if you leave off the trailing newline

echo -n

Beat that! :)

Or this

#!

(no newline)

2 bytes, and it works!

Just a space and we are down to 1 byte!

Heck, I've gotten it down to zero bytes and it still works!

Beat that! :)

Obviously, decide this via a Slashdot poll!

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

Who should get the LinuxFund Money?

• Linus Torvalds
• The Free Software Foundation
• EFF
• The Homeless Lunix Programmers Fund
• Divy it up according to lines of code contributed to the kernal
• CowboyNeal

Crow T. Trollbot

Re:Obviously, decide this via a Slashdot poll!

[infonography]

Agreed, lets VOTE!!!*

*Florida voters will not be counted (again).

Re:Obviously, decide this via a Slashdot poll!

[Anonymous Coward]

"*Florida voters will not be counted (again)."

And Wisconsin voters get to vote twice (Again)

A new bounty?

[Anonymous Coward]

That type of money cannot buy much in the real world, but offer over 100 $1000 bounties for open source solutions that don't exist yet and we could see years of evolution get pumped into open source projects OVERNIGHT!

TV promotion, the new-fashioned way

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's use the money towards a Gentoo or Debian logo on the hood of a NASCAR competitor ;)

Maybe Novell or Red Hat (maybe IBM even) will toss in a couple bucks for the effort?

What better way to capture 30 million US viewers at a time? ;)

Re:TV promotion, the new-fashioned way

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's use the money towards a Gentoo or Debian logo on the hood of a NASCAR competitor ;)

I vote for Debian. Flooding the Gentoo forums with the sort of people who think watching NASCAR is a good use for a Sunday afternoon sounds like the fastest possible way to kill a good resource. One round of the verbal buckshot Debianites unload on newbies will send them scurrying back to Windows faster than you can say "NASCAR is the pro wrestling of motorsports"...

No need

[stocks29]

There is no need to redistribute the money. When you make a purchase using your LinuxFund card it doesn't charge you more, its MBNA that donates the money per purchase. I say we just leave it and let it accumulate interest and someone can start up the LinuxFund again and support open source projects with it. Wouldn't mind assisting, but I have no time take a top level Administration role.

Re:No need

[The Angry Mick]

Don't bet on MBNA contributing to it for very long, though. I had a similar card with them that was supposed to donate a portion of all purchases to the Smithsonian.

They did it only for about a year, then I noticed some fine print at the bottom of a recent bill that said, "We are no longer participating in our arrangement with your organization". When I called to ask what that meant (already knowing the answer) they said they were dropping the payouts.

I dropped the card.

Re:No need

[stocks29]

Or maybe help out mplayer and ffmeg somehow....

$126,155.29

[RetepMc]

Hello Sir,

I have $126,155.29 of unused donations that I cannot access. Please give me your bank account number and all of your other personal information, and i will deposit the enitre amount in your account. Once it is received, all i ask is that you send me back 50%, leaving 50% for your troubles. Thanks.

Re:$126,155.29

[rackhamh]

Come on, nobody would fall for that!

Try misspelling a few words, that should do the trick.

he Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?

[infonography]

Oh the irony.

anyboy remember the tarbaby fable?

OpenOffice.org

[mogrify]

How about using it to resolve the OpenOffice.org/FSF/Java thing? Either pay developers to get the Java bits working in GCJ, or rewrite them in some other language?

Re:OpenOffice.org

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Its already beeing worked on:

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/harmony.html

Darl McBride

[borroff]

Darl's claiming it's his money.

Use it to match funds for K12 schools

[Halo5]

Use it to match funds for K12 schools that build computer labs based on OSS.

Disclaimer: My wife is a K12 teacher...

Take over the world, Pinky!

[jimand]

By my calcs, at a nickle each we could pwn 2,523,105 PC bots.

Turn that 126,000 into millions.

[Bazzible]

Just contact one of those gentlemen from Nigeria who can use that money to free up millions of their money! (: Bazz

an idea

[xutopia]

Legal "insurance" of the GPL. Let's have something to smack the big boys with.

Re:an idea

[MoonBuggy]

Nice idea, but $126k is not much in terms of lawyer time (to put it in perspective, that's about 1/20th of what the legal team on the iPod battery case are reportedly taking). I'd use it where it will have the greatest impact - $100k to a legal team isn't a huge amount, however $10k to 10 OSS programmers (as someone suggested higher up) is some fair motivation to achieve great things.

Sourceforge

[Anonymous Coward]

Where could it do better, and help more people?

SPI?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.spi-inc.org/

FSF

[NitsujTPU]

Dump the money into the FSF, it's the obvious thing to do.

Hmm

[pHatidic]

The website says the money was meant to fund any software under an open source license. Perhaps the money could be spent to promote Firefox, since it is currently the most visible of all open source projects and is something of a gateway drug. 100,000 dollars being donated to linux would do very little, but if spent on advertisements for something like Firefox or Wikipedia it could covert 10,000 new users in a single day, all of whom would be better suited to switch to a Free platform later.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you throw out numbers (10,000) without any historical data to back them up. It's a classic mistake, especially when setting up pricing structures. Sometimes going out on a limb and just pulling something out of your ass to boost your argument helps, but in this case 10,000 is still a relatively small number with "per-customer" costs of $12.62.

Now, about gateway drugs -- .... nevermind.

Re:Hmm

[pHatidic]

Except for that Firefox took out an ad in the New York Times and we have the traffic patterns before and after that, so we do know approximately the effect it had. If I remember correctly it was just a relatively modest spike, but still several thousand new users.

Re:Hmm

[Suppafly]

Firefox seems to be doing ok with the money they already have, how about giving it to a project that is struggling financially.

Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear PayPal User,

We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address. We have temporarily limited access to sensitive PayPal account features. Allowing your account access to remain limited for an extended period of time may result in further limitations on the use of your account and possible account closure.

If you recently accessed your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However, if you did not initiate the log ins, please visit PayPal as soon as possible to log in and perform the steps necessary to restore your account access:

Please Enter paypal passwort heer:__________

After filling in the information required we advise you to change your password. Changing your password is a security measure that will ensure that you are the only person with access to the account.

Thanks for your patience as we work together to protect your account.

Sincerely, PayPal

Give it to Google

[NigelJohnstone]

Seriously, give it to Google to add an extra 126K to the Open source funds they're funding.

You can reasonable expect that they will distribute it with ethics rather than dip into it in expenses. If you appointed any other (read poor/legal/accountancy) administrator you would risk it being eaten in expenses.

Personally, I'd like to see Linux date and time libraries improved. I'd like to be able to convert from arbitrary time zone to arbitrary time zone, down to the nano second from any reasonable year up to 99999 AD.
Go spend it on that, even Windows time libraries don't handle this correctly (they don't handle day light saving properly) and its something I miss for a server.

Re:Give it to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh.. . talk about obscure. Date and time libraries -- 100% more than Windows! Guaranteed!

Get your extra time here!

Re:Give it to Google

[xenocide2]

I don't think Google needs any more money. At this point, their underprivledged stocks are worth ludicrous sums of money, and I can only imagine what the value of their upperclass stock is worth. There are other organizations that are operating in the same way the Linux Fund was. Honestly, it would be neat to see the money used to fund bounties. 500 hundred dollars a pop could go pretty far in that reguard. Certainly beats the pants off of yet another stupid pointless conference.

Re:Give it to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we don't know how daylight savings is going to work in the future, you'll have a hard time (haha) knowing the local time for now + 1e10 seconds.

Re:Give it to Google

[NigelJohnstone]

True, yet there are already rules defined in the system based on the current DLS rules for each zone.

I can calculate time down to a fine grain for UTC and that will not change, so why not calculate UTC to a fine grain?
I can convert from UTC to the expected local time using the currently expected DLS rules set, again so why not?
The only I can't do with confidence is calculate a local time to a fine grain in the far future. But I can hold the UTC and keep doing the UTC->LOCAL conversion whenever I need to check it, so that as the rules update, the LOCAL time stays correct.

More to the point a lot of 32 bit code suffer a Y2038 problem when it is trivial to code around.

Re:Give it to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

No, don't give it to Google.

1) It's a commercial corporation with plenty of cash.

2) The summer of code program is a debacle, and has only resulted in many angry open source projects. It's completely disorganised, and might as well be declared a failure now. Unless Chris Dibona gets his act together.

As for your timezone conversion issues: have a look at libical. Timezone to timezone with proper DST handling.

Better yet, ask Stallman to do it

[winkydink]

1) He's always right
2) He's always right
and most importantly:
3) He's always right

[Stallman Defenders: Learn how to take a joke, ok?]

Re:Better yet, ask Stallman to do it

[FidelCatsro]

StallMan and his Powers of GNU will Crush you infamy
Stallman and his the Gnu/boy Wonder
Nanannananann Stallman
Nananannananana Stallman
Stallman Stallman Stallman zzzap Kapow Kerplung Pong...

Seriously though , Stallman may have a few good ideas on how to spend some of it . Despite his failings he genunily has alot of good ideas

Re:Better yet, ask Stallman to do it

[HisMother]

Only if he agrees to use it for shampoo and hairbrushes.

SLASHDOT POLL!

[Colin Smith]

Come on people, keep up.

Oh and you can put my name instead of the CowboyNeal option.

Re:SLASHDOT POLL!

[Stevyn]

na, it wouldn't work because it'd cost more than $126,155.29 to get Natalie Portman while wearing a metal bikini to stand next to a penguin while editing her make.conf file to add the -funroll-loops cflag.

Advertising

[AviLazar]

Use it to help advertise Open Source initiatives. A product doesn't have to be the biggest, or the best - it just has to have recognition. More Open Source initiative advertising - the more people are likely to support it. People give a LOT of credit to products that are advertised, as opposed to those that are not.

Would this be a Good Deal for Open Source?

[Noksagt]

What's even better is that for every new account opened and for every purchase made with the card, MBNA America Bank, N.A., (the issuer of the credit card) will make a contribution to the Linux Fund at no additional cost to you.

How much does the fund see? For most charity cards, you could get more bang for your buck if you get a 1-3% cashback card & just donate that to open source developers you want to support. Even IF the fund were under better management, is this something to be encouraged. I wouldn't mind yet another card (and one with Tux on it to boot) & the signup bonus might be good, but I feel fine donating to projects myself (see my URL).

Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would suggest letting someone like Ubuntu run the LinuxFund orginization. They seem to have the resources and organizational skills required for such an organization. They could use the money for their bounties and also help other projects that need some more capital. Just my .02

Sustainability

[xorowo]

I'm sure that many people will have great ideas for how the money should be used. The problem that I see is in sustainability. We can easily dole out the $126,000, but what happens when that money is gone? A solution has to be presented that is essentially an expenditure of one-time funds. Without knowing the rate that money is coming into the fund, there is no way to predict future fund availability.

I see this all the time in my industry -- people want to spend one-time funds on ongoing projects. As soon as that money is spent, people start scrambling for sustainability and complain about inept business practices. If the $126K is spent with this in mind, I am sure it can do wonderful things. If it is spent on a plan that requires future funding, we could have some problems.

Re:Sustainability

[bluGill]

True, but there are many projects that need 6 months or a year to get over a major hurdle. KDE need some people to work on the qt4 port now. There are many other projects with good ideas, but they are ideas that are complex enough that the programmer needs to be working full time on it to make meaningful progress.

Give it to the Human Fund

[drsmack1]

Money for people

Give it to me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, as an advid windows user, if given this money, will immediately cease using all windows products, install linux, and get all my friends to use it as well.

Just me and my family would likely double the linux userbase. /mods, it's a joke.

license

[mickyflynn]

SCO Linux licenses for all!!

Linux credit card?

[NightWulf]

So..let me get this strait, this group had this bank make a linux card and I assume a percentage of the proceeds went to this organization. Well, I hereby want to announce I will be working with Capital One to bring you /.'ers the "NightWulf Card". Every purchase you make on this card, allows a certain percentage of funds to be diverted to me...NightWulf. The perks on this card will be great, you'll get full free access to nightwulf.capitalone.com, where you get to see me:
1)Drive my new Bentley.
2)Sail my new Yacht.
3)Live in my new mansion.
3)Sleep with my many supermodel girlfriends.

All for the low APR of 22% with an annual fee of $49/yr.

When this project was proposed, I wanted facts ...

[Herschel Cohen]

However, my attempt to get this as posted on Ask Slashdot failed. A rough calculation had the yearly contribution of only $20/card. Given my charging patterns at the time I thought this to be too low an amount and I wanted some concrete accounting for this project. My other attempts to "Get The Facts" also came up dry, however, I never imagined that nothing would have been transfered!

I would suggest splitting the current total between Mozilla and OpenOffice as they seem the most visible, successful (to a wider audience of potential non-tech user population) free software groups.

This is not even my $0.02 view, because I ignored all solicitations to join this program.

Agreed... FSF.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a better place, except perhaps the two developers of NeoOffice/J, one of whom is now having to take a break from development due to economic concerns...

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[AKAImBatman]

Please mod parent up. Projects like NeoOffice/J are making a big difference. A mere $50k a year could potentially mean a world of difference toward the continuation of a project like that. IHMO, it is far more worth of funding than projects such as... hmmm... from the LinuxFunds front page:

* Scarface: A 3D GTA Game
* Kavlon Coloring Book

Which would you rather have, a coloring book or NeoOffice/J? My vote goes to NeoOffice/J.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[irabinovitch]

Any of those projects could easily apply for the funds. They would just need to submit a proposal. The projects listed on the site were not necessarily funded. I believe many of those were applying for funds. As a card holder and a user of NeoOffice I'd love to see them get funding from LinuxFund. When I met Jerritt a few years back it seemed like the problem they were having wasn't getting people to sign for the cards, but rather getting developers of good/interesting projects to apply for grants. This may have changed since 2002 though.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[rkcallaghan]

Please mod parent up. Projects like NeoOffice/J are making a big difference. A mere $50k a year could potentially mean a world of difference toward the continuation of a project like that

No, mod the grandparent down.

The question is "Who should handle the funds, not who should recieve them."

The best option for handling them is someone who is financially secure, has the proper legal ability to act as trustee, and no personal interest in their own project over another.

~Rebecca

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[nomadic]

The question is "Who should handle the funds, not who should recieve them."

Obviously, I should receive them. But maybe I should disburse them too, that way we can cut out the middleman.

The best option for handling them is someone who is financially secure, has the proper legal ability to act as trustee, and no personal interest in their own project over another.

I guarantee I have no interest in placing one project over another. All come a distant second to my relocation to Bali project.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[Anonymous Coward]

Acronyms like IMHO are annoying enough, but IHMO is downright retarded. Especially when you do it twice.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[incom]

Umm, for something called LinuxFund, wouldn't NeoOffice/J be a little innapropriate? From the Neoffice webpage:

"The goal of NeoOffice/J is to provide an entirely free and complete Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project--only with the look-and-feel you'd expect from any Macintosh application."

Now I'm half expecting to get modded down to oblivion by the Mac heads, but it just doesn't make sense for a "linux fund" to prioritize a peice of software that's exclusive to a non-linux OS.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[Anonymous Coward]

NeoOffice/J? Looks like a port of OO.o to a non-free platform. Who cares? How many people is that going to affect? Might as well apply the money to a project that needs it, and is worthwhile. Hurd anyone? ;-)

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[AKAImBatman]

NeoOffice/J? Looks like a port of OO.o to a non-free platform. Who cares?

Thousands of users (including myself). There's a very real userbase behind NeoOffice/J that you might not notice unless you actually own a Mac.

Might as well apply the money to a project that needs it, and is worthwhile. Hurd anyone? ;-)

Oh yeah, THAT'S not pissing money into the wind...

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[Anonymous Coward]

But why should something called *cough* LinuxFund donate money to (essentially) promote proprietary MacOSX? Instead of, you know, donating to programs which will entice people to use Linux? Just a thought.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[irabinovitch]

Because according to the LinuxFund site fund their goal was improving F/LOSS in general and *not* just Linux. They supported work on the BSDs, various open-source libraries, community organizations, etc.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[sleepingsquirrel]

Which would you rather have, a coloring book or NeoOffice/J?

I'd rather see a coloring book program on a Free Software platform, as opposed to "Yet Another Office Suite" ported to a closed source operating system like the Mac. I'm just guessing here, but I'd be willing to bet most of the people who signed on to the LinuxFund wouldn't want their dollars spent on programs running on an Apple OS.

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[ErikZ]

How is taking Open Office, and making it look good on a Mac, "Making a big difference"?

Re:Agreed... FSF.

[Anonymous Coward]

> The question is "Who should handle the funds, not who should recieve them."

What's the point of fostering an administrator (with all attendent overheads) without first defining the objectives. As we all know, spec'ing the project is harder than implementation. If a social goal of encouraging F/OSS as a cultural meme, then you might consider establishing social policy bond along the lines suggested by

www.socialgoals.com

LegalEaglet

The Human Fund

[yankeessuck]

The Human Fund could always use some money to donate Festivus poles to the needy during the holidays.

Buy source code!

[Trigun]

pick a software component that the OSS doesn't have an alternative to, and buy it.

Re:Buy source code!

[TexasDex]

pick a software component that the OSS doesn't have an alternative to, and buy it.

Hey, you might mod this funny, but that's just what they did with Blender, which was abandonware at the time. Now it's a thriving OSS app.

What could be next? Any ideas?

Winamp perhaps?...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Donate it to the Save the Wallet Foundation.

[Lester67]

Care of Lester.

(You know the SLASHDOT MASTERCARD is just around the corner. :-)

Race 6

[wombatmobile]

Put it all on horse 17.

Hi im a Nigerian Linux fund

[FidelCatsro]

Hello I am a linux fund from Nigeria
Due to recent strife i have been unable to help get my money out of the country,
As a result of my present situation as a refugee who cannot
have access to own an account or accounts,I am looking for a trustworthy
individual /firm to advice me in making the rightful investment as wellas
to provide account(s)where the funds will be lodge into,more also we are
at the interim interested in buying linux projects.

I strongly believe that associating with you to emback on this and other
business ventures will derive a huge success hereafter and it will be a
long lasting business association. if you have any question, do not
hesitate to contact me with the above telephone number and e-mail address.

I also want you to know that I kept this all along,not because I am self
sentered,or greedy,but for the common interest of my people.

I await your anticipated co-operation.

yours truly

Mr. Brown Potricio.(of Nigeria linux)

Broken Contract.

[kneel]

The URL seems to be Slashdotted. Har har.

Seriously, they should give the money back to the cardholders.

I have one of these accounts. I ran up $3k on it. God knows how much money in interest I've paid on that.

I said I would buy shit if MBNA gave money to Linux Fund.

Gimme my money back if you aren't following my contract!

Re:Broken Contract.

[Anonymous Coward]

MBNA's followed the contract, all the money is in the hands of the fund.

Its not actually that much cash

[Anonymous Coward]

...without wanting to be mean about it just hand it over to the FSF or something. If it was a million then perhaps there'd be some headscratching but a hundred thousand and dollars at that? Buy everyone a drink at the bar at the next big Linux conference or something. Its chump change really.

Patents, patents, patents...

[SharpFang]

There are so many open-source projects hindered by different patents. "This is unsupported, because of patent issues connected with algorithm xxx (covered by patent#nnnnn)". Buy and release the most obstrusive patents.

Re:Patents, patents, patents...

[Thanatopsis]

Given the cost of a patent, $127,000 will not buy you a single one. I just completed patent and there is no way I would sell it for that little. Nor would any other patent holder with a lick of sense.

Invest!

[knightri]

A few percent here, a few percent there, and sooner or later it starts to add up to real money. Why waste 126k now when we can waste 526k later.

Options

[Quenyar]

Seems pretty simple to me.

"Linux Fund, Inc. exists to advance the state of the art of Free and Open Source Software through its research, education and grant-giving programs."

It seems to me that if the Linux Fund is actually defunct, its board should say so and hand over this money (and any other money they have in other corporate assets) to another group of similar aims.

As a Linux Fund contributor (and a Linux Fund MBNA card holder) I vote for gnu.org

Well...

[Shads]

... how about donating to popular projects which accept donations on sourceforge? Donate some to apache, gaim, azureus, the linux kernel... slews of place could use it. Pay a well renouned open source programmer or two for a year to do nothing but work on a specific project... donate it to the fsf or eff to help protect opensource. Donate to google for next years opensource scholarship program so open source gets more quality projects and programmers in the long run... there are slews of good ideas, pick one and roll with it, don't let it rot in an account! Make an opensource programming contest, top project as voted by slashdot community gets 30,000... next gets 15,000... next gets 7,500. Run it every six months till the cash runs out, maybe see if other people are willing to donate money back into the project to fund it on a perpetual basis! Slews of possibilites!

Re:Well...

[SharpFang]

Donating to the "big ones" is not such a good idea - they get enough from giants. There are millions behind Apache development. I'd rather see supporting small but interesting ideas, or these that are less likely to gain money from industry giants. Or even better, set them as bounty for desired features...

Re:Well...

[Shads]

bounty for desired features is a good idea.

"10k for winner"
"5k for runner up"

place 8 projects using that format. have slashdot or sourceforge or where ever vote on the favorite.

Re:Well...

[SharpFang]

I'd rather see more flexible system (primarily without opportunity to "write some shit nobody would use, to get $5k"). Say, $1k-$20 bounty, to be given to winner person/team (amount depending on how hard to implement it is, and how desired it os), and in case of several entries, split (or not) into shares dependent upon judging value of the entries.

Re:Give it to Gnome, so they can buy a Clue

[Monkelectric]

I'm gonna feed the troll here. KDE is *UGLY*. If I wanted my ocmputer to look like windows XP, i'd install it.

Keep it going

[Anonymous Coward]

Pick a open source project every year, and sponsor the project for a year for its excellent contribution to the society.

Question is what should we do, if the project is from some 'hostile' country, since the fund is base in US?

Re:Give it to Gnome, so they can buy a Klue

[Atomizer]

Don't you mean "so they can buy a klue"?

linuxfund card?

[selfabuse]

So, how exactly does one apply for this card? I pulled up a list of all the cards MBNA does off of their website, and I don't see it listed. I went to the linuxfund page, and there's a link that says "click here to apply today", yet when I click there, I get sent to http://www.linuxfund.org/products, which is the same page I was already at.. Has it been discontinued? Meh. My credit is so bad I'm sure they wouldn't let me have it anyway. There's a number to call, but hey, I'm a geek, I'm not going to pick up a phone if there's a way to do it online.

Re:linuxfund card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they would let you have the card. The MBNA wants its pound of flesh. This isn't the 80s when only people with good credit can get cards. Now your CC debt isn't wiped away in bankruptcy so you become a debt slave to MBNA for the rest of your life.

Re:linuxfund card?

[irabinovitch]

The site indicates you should call MBNA at 1-800-932-2775 and tell them you want a LinuxFund Card. If you mention the promo code YJGU they probably get some sort of sign up bonus to.

Linux Fund College Interns...

[a3217055]

They should hold of on to the money ( put it in a saving account ) and then next summer have it go to sponsor 10 college students to work on a open source project that will benefit ONLY Linux. 10 college students at 4,000$ stipends is $40,000 and this will go a long way in starting and initating projects. There are many projects scientific or otherwise, like gui design etc... so a summer intern can put in about 400 hours of work for 10 weeks that times 10 would be 4000 hours on a project, that would be great. Maybe they can all get togehter and design a complex parallel application or a testing and benchamarking suite, or a voice operated GPS guidance system for people in cars. Or a night vision image filter for dealing with night vision data through a certain type of camera etc... The ideas are many but what ever it maybe, I think the youngsters of our society should get it to encourage the propogation of open source software and also in the development of new ideas and opportunities. I say this should be done only for Linux is because that is what the money came from and should thus reflect some work to it. But if the application is OSS ( Which the app should be ).

Why not reinvest it?

[part_of_you]

...or help find a cure for slashdotting.

Phishing?

[Epi-man]

Is this another phishing scam? Hoping people will post their information for a deposit?

two ideas

[CarrionBird]

1. Bounties on a specifc needed driver or feature. Split it up into say 5k or 20k or whatever prizes awarded to whoever does X first within certain parameters.

2. Fund 1-2 kernel or interface developers for a years full time work. Dole it out as a monthly salary so that the fund can cut it's losses if the relationship goes sour.

Re:two ideas

[mozkill]

these ideas might be better than my "100 scholarships" idea...

Are we the right people to ask?

[danharan]

If I took out a MasterCard with MBNA to support an institution, I'm not sure what use the average /.'er weighing in would be.

How about MBNA take upon itself to contact those that have its card and ask them? It can't be the first time a non-governmental entity using this as a fundraising technique goes belly-up, there has got to be a process for this.

Although I'm sure Linus and other Linux coders would have some moral authority, I wonder who has the legal authority in this matter...

Linux Stability and Security

[nimdawg]

We hear "Stability" and "Security" all the time as the two biggest buzzwords in the industry. Why not put money in those aspects of Linux? I know there are plenty of security experts who dabble around in Linux to try and find out what holes there might be, but with that much money they could probably afford a decent team of auditors to seriously look at all the Linux code and anylize it for every security flaw they could possibly think of that hasn't been resolved. Stability might be a little bit more obscure but why not try and hire developers to spend time finding potential sources for crashes and suggesting ways to fix them? The Linux hype is always "Linux: More stable and more secure than MS", why not actually make it uncontestably true?

This sucks.

[ender-]

Well that sucks. I have one of those cards. I've had it for years though I don't really use it much. I think everyone who had one should get a say in how that money is spent.

As for sustainability, if everyone on slashdot got one of these cards and started using it, it would probably be sustainable. I think the card just wasn't well advertised enough so not enough people signed up for it.

For only 5% of that...

[NetCynicism]

I will promise never to use Windows again (except for games).

Just write the check out to me...

[theraccoon]

My friends call me "CASH".

Bad Impressions

[Seumas]

Sadly, this sort of thing shows the rest of the world (politicians, academics, businessmen - people we want to take open-source seriously) that we're just a bunch of inept, incapable children at best -- and possibly scamming, theieving hooligans at worse.

Maybe this is the reason geeks don't unionize.

Bounties for non-Corporate functions?

[buro9]

How about create a community based nomination and voting system for key pieces of functionality/usability that users require/desire and are unlikely to be fulfilled by the corporations who have their own interests in Linux and OSS.

Once a list of desired functionality/usability is drawn up and prioritised, geeks could assess the complexity level and through another community based system agree on a suitable bounty for it to be done.

Bounties should only ever be allocated out of the money that is there... never on what may/might come in in the future.

The money should sit in Escrow and be given to any entity/entities that fulfil the deliverables for a given bounty.

Any bounty unclaimed after X amount of time should be reassessed as to whether it is still needed, and the money increased or the bounty removed as applicable.

Just an idea.

Re:Bounties for non-Corporate functions?

[geomon]

Bounties should only ever be allocated out of the money that is there... never on what may/might come in in the future.

That has certainly been suggested frequently on /. and I think is probably the best use for the money.

As noted before, however, there are legal issues to rangle with when using the money for purposes other than those originally intended.

Re:Bounties for non-Corporate functions?

[swv3752]

Except that such a proposal would be following the wishes of those that donated the money. Basically LinuxFund gave grants to people working on a F/OSS project. Such proposals would still be used towards the same thing.

something usefull..

[marmotte]

how much cost a superball advertising ?

End our troubles

[supra]

Instead of trying to diminish the funds now, why not leave it in the bank and continue adding to it. When there's enough money, buy Microsoft and end all our woes.

Re:End our troubles

[Anonymous Coward]

Love it!

Obligatory Office Space Quote

[spidereyes]

What would I do with the money you ask, I'll tell you...two chicks at the same time!!!!!!

Tux MasterCard

[palmech13]

I have one too. All in all, the cute Tux picture has garnered exactly 3 conversations about Linux and probably 50 comments by women saying, "cute penguin!"

It's my primary credit card, so even if they're donating a small fraction of the total, I figure I've probably kicked in a couple of hundred over the years. I'd have just blown it on gin, so they might as well have it.

Re:Tux MasterCard

[Anonymous Coward]

ew gin tastes like pine-sol to me. rum all the way. ;-)

Re:Tux MasterCard

[llefler]

I have one too. All in all, the cute Tux picture has garnered exactly 3 conversations about Linux and probably 50 comments by women saying, "cute penguin!"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Maybe if they get this straightened out, I'll switch my MBNA mastercard to LinuxFund. Although I don't use it much (vacations), but no point in that money going to a fraternity I wasn't real impressed with anyway.

Challenge!

[alewar]

A good idea would be to make a challenge with the money as the price, for the team who develop an innovative or really needed GNU program. For example a good project management module for openoffice, a free autocad equivalent, or things like that.

We could get

[2names]

180 SCO licenses for that money...

*ducks*

Re:We could get

[vsprintf]

180 SCO licenses for that money...

At the going-out-of-business sale, that covers the 29 cents. Now what about the other $126,155?

use the money for 100 scholarships

[mozkill]

I say have a competition for scholarships. break the money into 100 pieces and then have a competition for 100 scholarships which are judged by hired judges (using some of the money)

100 students going to school with Linux money WILL have an impact on the world... that is for sure...

FSF or Eff

[MrPerfekt]

Those both sound like good places to donate open-source related funds and I doubt anybody would be severely against it even if they can think of a better place to donate it.

Given all the legal hassles in the recent past...

[fade]

... and the likely hassles the community is set to face in the near-term future, I think it would be a good idea to give the money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and have them administer the Linux Fund for the betterment of
free software in general.

Posix, Posix, Posix

[api]

Seeing as this is devolving into a question of what to do with the funds, here is my $0.02:

Invest it in the POSIX compliance of leading open source operating systems to boost their "free"nixness and keep them interoperable.

MD

SCO Called . . .

[CaryTheSane]

They claim that its their money, and if you'd send a check for $126,155.29, nobody will get sued. . .

QEMU Accelerator Module

[c0l0]

What about freeing (aka GPL'ing) the QEMU Accelerator module with a certain part of the money?

I'd prefer development

[bluGill]

I'd prefer they use it for development. Most linux hackers are paid these days (By IBM, redhat, and so on), as are the openOffice.org hackers (by sun). However there are plenty of projects that can't claim that.

Better to hire a contractor for 6 months of working on one project, and then let the money build for another year before hiring another. There are good programmers who can take a 6 month contract for some project, and do a lot of good work. I know of at least one person who has done this[1]. Fund a few more of these.

Right now KDE could use a few full time people to push the qt4 port. They are in a place where major effort is needed to get some grunt work done, before they can take off again with the more visible development. Other projects hit the same situation where they need someone to do major work before they can get to the next level.

Promotion is nice, but frankly I don't care if the unwashed masses are using linux or not. I care that it works fine for me. I care that it is stable, and secure.

[1]He was a FreeBSD hacker, had some ideas that needed 6 months to implement, and 6 months without a contract yet. He agreed to less than his normal price, because it was something he wanted to do.

Pick Me! (Students)

[Akoman]

I obviously vote for the FSF or the EFF since they are established organizations. But how about this for an idea: Keep LinuxFund. Someone broke down the estimate for how much the lead was paid ($14 an hour). Guess what, I make that much at a dead end call center. I'm also a computing science student and between all that I fit some volunteer work running two groups. One is all about Open Source advocacy. Do you know how much I make at my dead end call center? Roughly $14 CDN. However, I would gladly take on an increased workload and stress for something more interesting and in the field I want. So have the FSF or the EFF choose students to run it, we rarely find jobs paying this well anyways.

Office Software...

[Bobzibub]

One person year to create a GPL Exchange adaptor, so we can have Windoze free, free office software.....

One person year to work on Kolab or Open Exchange (or another) simplify the installation of these products...

Imagine what that would do for all of open source????

Cheers,
-D

As someone with a Linux Fund card...

[*igor*]

I'd prefer if this money went to the FSF, or perhaps the folks at SourceForge to sponsor worthy projects, ideally those which don't already have corporate interest.

This isn't enough money to really run a big office or something, but it is enough to get some useful cracks filled in.

-jeff

Re:As someone with a Linux Fund card...

[Qubit]

Yeah, I don't have my Linux Fund card anymore, but I am surprised to hear that the project has fallen apart. Now that I'm a working stiff I finally had enough money to send some to the FSF and EFF, but I was thinking about giving the Linux Fund some money so that "worthwhile projects" could request money and get some piece of the pie.

Are there any legal hurdles to getting this money to projects over at Sourceforge? (if the Linux Fund group has not been active for several months, that may cause problems, methinks).

(Oh, and hi Jeff ;-)

Shuttlworth Foundation Bounty Fund

[teneighty]

I think the best use of these funds would be pay bounties for Linux features, similar to Mark Shuttleworth's bounty fund.

Follow Google's example: Summer of code

[jivo]

Google's 'Summer of Code' http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html looks like an appealing idea. How about following up on that, eg. by donating 100.000$ to a company, that in return for the publicity, will organize, administer, publish, hand out, whatever it takes, to distribute 100.000$ to selected Open Source Projects programmers. Next year, another company would be selected the honerable job.

Is this even legal?

[nlinecomputers]

Ok so a bunch of geeks get a Credit card thinking that a percentage will fund OSS projects yet the money sits untouched. Is this not fraud? (All be it stupid fraud?)

Is this a legally setup non profit organization? Is taxes Federal or otherwise being paid on this money? Seems like somebody ought to be heading to a jail cell to me.

Give it back

[FreakyGeeky]

I have one of these MBNA LinuxFund MasterCards.

Through my dealings with MBNA, I've decided they're one of the smarmiest credit card companies one can do business with.

It started as a fixed-rate card at an excellent interest rate. (With a one-year 0% balance-transfer rate to boot.) After a year, they switched it to a variable-rate account. The rate was still good, so I decided to keep it.

Every two months after that, they would sneak in a change in terms to the account. They would print this on a small piece of paper and hide it in the multiple pieces of crap along with the statement selling other overpriced junk. Luckily, I've caught it each time. These change of terms documents would explain that they were changing the interest rate to something ridiculous. Each time I would call and complain and they would set things right again, leaving my account at its current APR.

You may be thinking, "oh your credit sucks" or "that's what you get for not paying them on time". If that were the case, I wouldn't be complaining. Not only am I not late paying them, I'm not late paying anyone else. My credit score is fantastic too.

Things changed when I bought my first house a few months back. I got another one of these stating they were raising my APR to prime plus 19.99%. That's mind-bogglingly high! When I called them about this one, they refused to keep it at my low rate. They claim my new mortgage has nothing to do with it, but were unable to provide any reason whatsoever for the increase.

Luckily, these enclosures allow you to reject the change in writing, keeping your old APR. I did that, and have since transferred the balance elsewhere.

I would like to see all of the money raised through this program to be returned to the card members according to how much they each contributed.

Re:Give it back

[pipingguy]

Don't CC companies assume that you already owe the total of your unspent credit limit?

Scam-ola!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Yes-sir-ee.

One word: Wine.

[crhylove]

If we really want Linux to make inroads on the desktop, it had better play GTA:San Andreas. Or I don't know anyone who will install it.

rhY

Oh, at least.

[jd]

The going rate for programmers in Oregon is about 60K/year, which means the fund could support about two people here (or about 200 in any country that pays crap).

Actually, if you had two programmers working full-time on nothing more than using code validators to find bugs, then submitting patches to those bugs, you'd get a lot of work done in a year. Easily enough to justify the cost to any corporate backer. There are plenty of code validators out there, and the coders could simply target whatever package the validators showed as most in need at that time.

(Of course, in an ideal world, there'd be a kernel code freeze for a month. During that time, the US Government would spend a few billion on developers, who would fix the whole Linux kernel end-to-end, with near-to-zero bugs left at the end of that month. The process would then repeat for GCC, glibc, X11, Gnome and KDE, after which the national deficit would barely have budged, but software reliability would have skyrocketted.)

Re:Oh, at least.

[Jerf]

[Linux kernel], GCC, glibc, X11, Gnome and KDE

You think those are the packages bringing us down?

Re:Oh, at least.

[jd]

I think compiler writers should form a pact. Buggy code and Engrish documentation should produce fatal compile-time errors and preferably some very insulting pop-up windows which will be burned into the monitor if the coder doesn't make some effort to fix things.

It should also report any detected use of .NET to Homeland Security and/or the SAS, depending on the country and the severity of the offence.

Re:Oh, at least.

[mikefe]

There's only one good thing I can say about more government spending.

At least you're not gay since you like to suck off their tit.

Re:Oh, at least.

[digitalunity]

US Government
Thats a dumb idea. Considering the federal goverment's propensity for fucking things up, I don't want them anywhere near my kernel. I don't mind the NSA, but if Homeland Security tried to 'enhance' my kernel, I would stop using linux.

Got it?

star trek

[Anonymous Coward]

use it to produce another season of enterprise!

Idea?

[da3dAlus]

*Ahem* Hot Gritz + Natalie Portman, DUH!!!

I know!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets slashdot them, so they can spend the money on bandwidth and on picking their server up off the floor.

Debian? Fedora? Gentoo?

[whoever57]

How about just donating it to a small number of the non-profit organizations that build the "basic" distributions (on which many others are based)? Like the Debian Foundation and the newly created Fedora foundation?

Re:Debian? Fedora? Gentoo?

[AKAImBatman]

If you did that, what would be the point of the LinuxFunds Foundation? i.e. LinuxFunds would become redundant and should just be absorbed into some other foundation.

In any case, it usually makes sense to have a targetted goal for the money. What is LinuxFunds trying to achieve? Are they looking to support specific types of functionality, bootstrap promising new OSS projects, encourage new OSS based companies, or a combination thereof? It's important to have a focus (and earmarked money for that focus) otherwise you're just pissing money into the wind.

Re:Debian? Fedora? Gentoo?

[irabinovitch]

-Isn't Fedora supported pretty well by Red Hat? -Debian currently has around $50K it hasn't touch according to the Project Leader report in April. -Gentoo... I'm not sure. Anyways, I think the money would be better used to pay for individual software projects and not for an overall distrobution.

FSF Free Java and Free Flash projects

[WarwickRyan]

As discussed many times on Slashdot, the FSF projects for a free Flash replacement and free Java replacement is a pretty good cause. Details here: http://www.fsf.org/news/free-java-and-flash.html

That, or look long term and put it towards protecting our rights: so the EFF get it.

The LinuxFund

[ahg]

The LinuxFund was/is a non-profit organization that was founded to help fund open source development. The source of funds was from credit cards issued by MBNS America and later MBNA Canada too. A percentage of all items charged to the card was credited to the fund by MBNA. It cost the card holder $0.00, nothing, nada - there were no annual fees. (Of course moderate interest rates applied to anyone carrying a balance and there's the opportunity cost of not using a miles card or cash back card, etc).

Users of the card contributed to open source merely by using the card. it's a fun card to hold too - people ask about the cure penguin on that card and open the door to telling them all about Linux. Even Linus Torvald's himself was (maybe still is) a card holder. He held up his card up at Comdex back several years ago.

The card was marketed largely at tradeshows like Comdex, Linux World Expo, etc. My understanding is: Funding from a lot of the companies that at one time could spend liberally on the linux non-profits slowed. The companies that once spent lots of money on tradeshow booths for non-profits started to spend less, and LinuxFund was not able to get tradeshow space. Same goes for the companies that once spent liberally on plush penguins, tee shirts, beach towels, and Loki Games to give away at the shows. Some didn't have the extra cash to spend, and some went belly-up. (Loki Games, LinuxMall, etc)

I think once the tradeshow biz went south, and new subscribers were harder to recruit, the momentum was lost. The tradeshows gave the group notoriety and led to lots of willing volunteers. When that all died down... the group slowly withered.

Sad... it seemed like a great idea.

Re:The LinuxFund

[cwj123]

Even though it's not a miles or cash back card, it still is a MBNA Worldpoints card (Free stuff, giftcards, preloaded credit cards etc) based on the dollars you spend.

Give a few grand to me!

[Stonent1]

I'm currently in collections with MBNA on my LinuxFund card!

Software Freedom Day materials

[HenrikOxUK]

It might be good to sponsor some teams for Software Freedom Day this year to help spread general awareness of Linux and FOSS in general.

One word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ferrari!

We could give it to Stallman

[elhondo]

And watch the first 4 grand be spent changing the official name to the GNULinuxFund

great :-(

[mattsucks]

Now my warm fuzzy is all cold and sticky.

Re:great :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

hold it more loosely next time.

Re:great :-(

[funwithBSD]

Cold and Prickly.

The opposite of a Warm Fuzzy is a Cold Prickely.

See here:

http://www.claudesteiner.com/fuzzy.htm

Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it to Theo and friends.

http://openbsd.org/donations.html

Use it to establish a software patent portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

for the open-source community.

YAII

[Somegeek]

Yoda Acronym It Is. (YAII)

I'm really glad Slashdot ran this story

[Anonymous Coward]

As much heat as we give the editors for duplicate and troll stroies, I would like to thank the editors for running this story. I use a Linux Fund credit card and was quite concerned when the web site went down and Linux Fund's phone number stopped working; I want to see a percentage of my purchases go to help fund Linux.

For example, Dillo is a nice little browser (and the only browser that runs on my 486 antique); they got one batch of money from the fund. I would like to see the fund give them, say, $50,000 to implement JavaScript and SSL to the point that it is possible to use Dillo to log in to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. Fixing the table render would also be nice with Dillo, since their broken table rendering stops be from being able to do true cross-browser rendering (I can write pages to work with everything but Dillo, but getting a page to work with everything including Dillo is a little more tricky)

Not the FSF or the EFF

[TimRiker]

The FSF (al least rms) adamantly resists using the term Linux to refer to anything other than the kernel. Thus the LinuxFund is clearly for funding the Linux kernel, and not any other Free Software. Since the FSF does not own the Linux kernel, they clearly should not get any of the money.

Clearly the EFF is not "Linux" either. I'm all for what they do. I'm just pointing out that the EFF does not reflect the same goals that I read on http://linuxfund.org/.

I'd suggest that someone set up a site to first poll for projects, and then allow folks to vote for them. If the polling and voting could be constrained to card holders, then all the better. Unfortunately I expect that would cost more to do than it is worth.

If it's going to go to one place, I'd recommend Debian, but then I'm a Debian developer. ;-)

PS: Perhaps a better name would have been FOSSFund.org ;-) /me likes that and registers it. I'll donate it if someone else (tm) maintains the fund.

PPS: I've been a card holder since '01 according to my card. I recall they had to re-open my account once and I think I got my first LinuxFund card back in '99.

Me! Me! Me! Me!

[RWerp]

I can surely "distribute" this money. Half for me, half for my pals at work.

A fun card

[latticeguy]

What I like most about my Linux fund card is the smiles I get when using it because of the cute penguin.

Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I will. put in checking account # 695874503658 under the name Yura Sukr.

me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it to me and I will help distribute it to open sores girls at the strip clubs.

Oh, you meant open *source*. Never mind...

LinuxBIOS

[benjamindees]

It's a project that benefits all users. Nobody will complain that it doesn't fit into his/her pet usage.

Software is a vertical monopoly. Free Software is close to being free of proprietary restrictions, but not quite there. With the ineveitable implementation of TCPA and hardware-based DRM, general computing may be at risk of becoming a thing of the past. Open source projects would be the first ones to suffer.

Not very popular but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay for setting up and conducting usability studies KDE and GNOME, and their respective applications. If the original project developers won't respond, and there's money left. Pay someone else to revise the various windows, menus, dialog boxes, etc to fix problems. This will do more to bring Linux to the desktop than anything else.

How about us cardholders?

[lawpoop]

Member since '01.

Why pay for bloated American way of life?

[glrotate]

Shouldn't the objective be to get the most bang for the buck? Why not hire 20 Indian programmers at $3/hr for a year instead of 2 Americans?

Re:Why pay for bloated American way of life?

[Agent000]

Parent has a strangely very good idea.

Bill Gates should get the funds...

[pl1ght]

Because microsoft can always use extra help in the continuing development of its excellent windows product for the masses.

Screw that

[commodoresloat]

I know where we can use the money to purchase 2,523,105 Windows servers, and still have change left over for bubble gum!

*babble babble*

[Anonymous Coward]

*babble babble*

*squabble*

*mutter*

I will take it!

I will take the Linuxfund money to Open Source-dor.

Though, I do not know the way.

Um, What does the original paperwork say?

[NotQuiteReal]

I am sure MBNA doesn't set something like this up on someone's say-so.

What does the original contract say, I am sure it is all in the fine print, somewhere.

SCO

[Joe Fiction]

Use the money to buy.... and disolve and liquidate SCO.

Don't distribute the cash; hire a new project lead

[omnipotus]

I am a MBNA LinuxFund Cardholder. In exchange for signing up for it during the Usenix Annual Technical conference in Boston in June of 2001, I received a plush Penguin. Ever since, I have made a point of using this MasterCard in place of my Discover Card to make large purchases from time to time so that I felt like I was doing my part to contribute to a cause I believe in. It's so enraging to learn that the opportunity has been so mismanaged. If I had used my Discover Card for those very same purchases, I would have cash in my hand now to show for it.

I can't really find the right words to express how mad I am that the philanthropy I thought I was helping to endow has been so poorly administered. While I believe that the EFF and the FSF have the means to manage this program as well as the intention to spend the money on projects that are of the right spirit, I feel these groups already have a marketing machine that generates appropriate levels of donation.

I'd really like to see this get back on it's feet, because I really liked the idea of there being an organization where one could apply to get a small grant to work on F/OSS. What chance that other likeminded cardholders are interested in getting their hands dirty and taking this over? Where can I find more information about applying for the job? I'm not a financial services guru by any means, but I lead a small non-profit group in college, I help run a small technology business in Baltimore that I co-found, and I'm excellent at logistics. $28K seems like a lot of lost opportunity given the state that this has reached; I think I could do better - where should I send my resume?

"and if you're tired of chewing -- pass it on"

[tlord]

I think that since the presumptive intention of the donors of this money has been thwarted the best thing to do is to use it as neutrally and apolitically as is practical for a charitable purpose.

Surely the failed fundraiser has a primary address. Surely that town or city has urgent needs that have nothing to do with computers and that are so basic as to not be reasonably disagreeable to many people. Surely donors were aware that some part of their donation would benefit the community around the organization that collected it.

Give the money there. Let the good that comes of (feeding orphans, adopting a highway, planting trees in a city park, whatever) stand as a memorial to a nice idea that didn't quite work out.

In other words, honor the morality behind a failed charity effort by redirecting the funds to the most agreeable yet context-specific charitable cause possible. Maybe label the contribution, to the degree possible, as "from the free and open source software community of the world".

-t

What's so darn funny? (was: Re:Buy source code!)

[Qbertino]

The Blender Foundation did precisely this. And they've come a long way since, including forcing commercial competitors to rethink their pricing. (www.blender.org)

Missing Option!

[fair_n_hite_451]

Where's the "breasts" option? ;-)

Re:Missing Option!

[msim]

I'm afraid it's already been done.

http://www.giveboobs.com/

This running an organization stuff is real work

[AnimalCoward]

Typical. Yet another example of Geeks who think they know everything.

Started a project that sounded like a good idea. Hey! Wait a minute! This is work!

They probably still don't know the difference between writing code and delivering software to another human being.

Simplest scheme yet

[noidentity]

1) Profit!!!

Re:Exiled Nigerian Royalty are firing up their ema

[ImaLamer]

Dear Sir,

I work for the firm MBNA and have an account with $126,155.29 in deposits in the name of one LinuxFund...

what about enlightenment or device drivers?bountie

[Anonymous Coward]

e17 and all the libs and code infraestruture seemed like a promising project that lacked manpower (and too radical for a quick adoption despite being well designed, and that code be used for several bounties to code several common linux apps to use its potencial better, if not that what about device driver/hardware bounties? hell what about seeing if the ogg hardware framework can be coded into something actuallly usefull p.s:
(ok buying usefull patents is way too pricey to use with this money but it could be something to look at next time someone finds loose money for open.source

not nonprofit

[Anonymous Coward]

They never filed for federal nonprofit status. Technically, they are a "public benefit" firm under Oregon law but subject to federal taxation.

Re:not nonprofit

[irabinovitch]

That is correct. You can find more info on their legal status here with the Oregon Secretary of State.

Give it to Google

[djchristensen]

Google already has a program in place to evaluate open source projects and provide a stipend. Give the money to Google with the restriction that it fund core Linux-related projects and developers. I bet we could even trust them not to fund mostly projects that would benefit them directly. I think we could even expect them to donate the administrative costs, leaving 100% of the funds for distribution.

they will owe taxes.

[Anonymous Coward]

LinuxFund was a state public benefit corporation. It's not a nonprofit under federal guidelines, which means they'll owe some back taxes.

Oregon link

The state dissolved the corporation because they didn't file renewal papers.

They will likely also owe some penalties and legal fees.

So there won't be hundreds of thousands to give away.

Off topic:

Use this as an example of stellar open-source programming:

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Lots of eyeballs, but the problem still persists.

Simple solution

[houghi]

Buy SCO and put all of it under OSS licences. Give the rest to Linus as a present.

Marketing Funds

[mpapet]

/.'s hate the marketers, but it seems to me it would be easier to administer the funds in a very accountable fashion (reciepts) by supporting marketing open source projects.

Example: The Foo project applies for marketing funds to pay for part of a booth at Linux World. Foo project is approved for X dollars and has to produce reciepts accordingly in order to get their grant after the trip.

$24/hr???

[Urusai]

I charge $60. Is this the outsourcing rate? Or am I just a greedy bastard?

Re:$24/hr???

[AKAImBatman]

I charge $60. Is this the outsourcing rate? Or am I just a greedy bastard?

Neither. The ~$24/hr is a rate I consider "reasonable" for grant work. It's not intended to compare to the rates available in the private sector; rather it is a rate that is intended to reflect realistic living costs in non-metropolitan areas.

So, no. You're not a "greedy bastard". :-)

FSF

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we give it all to the FSF, possibily with the stipulation that it be used to fund development projects rather than other things. Other possibilities are OSDL (employer of Linus Torvalds), or possibly breaking it up into a few big macrodonations to projects like SPI/Debian, Gnome, KDE, x.org, Apache, etc. Macrodonations require little administrative overhead, so would actually fund free software projects, rather than being wasted on some dude's salary managing interns who do jack squat.

Give them to the EFF

[AlexDusty]

If not else, for all the work they are doing against the software patents in Europe. If Europe will be sw-patents-free, Open Source sw could reach new heights. Otherwise, if sw patents will reach also Europe, Open Source development can be doomed.

I have that card...

[Mintee]

So, can I get my 5.9 percent back?

I have one of these cards.

[jelwell]

I have a LinuxFund MBNA card. I noticed a few months ago that the website was down and there hadn't been any activity by LinuxFund in years.

So I called up MBNA and they assured me that no entity was receiving any money anymore from my purchases. And they offered to switch me over to a WorldPoints program instead (but I got to keep the penguin logo on my card and "Linux Fund" name anyways).

I figured the MBNA contact just didn't understand my questions/concern about the legitimacy (or even exisistence) of the Linux Fund. But I knew that I no longer wanted my "rewards" to go to, what I could only assume, was now "some dude trying to cash in on a failed business plan".

Joseph Elwell.

How about a contest

[Ryan Stortz]

How about a contest? Developers are given a few monthes to start and finish a "killer" application for Linux. The winning development team gets the money.

Obviously, it'd be a little lame to allow established projects to enter, because it'd just be unfair. There would need to be some rules like:

• No code forks
• Projects must be relativly new
• obviously -- The code has to be open source (GPL/BSD/MIT, it doesn't matter. Open Source doesn't automatically imply GPL).

It seems like the perfect idea for the money, to me, but it is my idea...

Just a little bit about LinuxFund

[Diellan]

I happen to be a very good friend of the guy who started LinuxFund several years ago, an MBA named Benjamin Cox. Though, since he likes setting up businesses more than running them, he stepped down some time ago -- he's currently starting up a used book store in Israel, while doing all kinds of international business for a steel-drilling company off the coast of Gibraltor that he co-founded. So, yes, he's an old school entrepreneur. And he's also done all kinds of random cool stuff, while he was at LinuxFund (http://news.com.com/2100-1040-231179.html?legacy= cnet for example). Here's a news article from it's founding: http://features.linuxtoday.com/developer/199908270 0210NW

The basic premise is this: members get a MasterCard (with a Tux on it!), and a small portion of all the purchases they make on it goes to LinuxFund. And, yes, even Linus Torvalds has one of these credit cards. Sadly, no, I don't, as I didn't meet him until after he left LinuxFund (though I wouldn't mind one!).

Every so often, the members of the LinuxFund then vote on where this money goes. They give a bunch of small grants (generally only 4 digits) to worthy OSS projects, like Xiph, bittorrent development, etc. Therein lies the problem... Since the LinuxFund is defunct, there aren't really any regular meetings for the membership.

But, as the precedence has always been that the members vote on where the money goes, it would make sense that there should be some kind of voting system on what to do with the remaining money. Knowing the spirit that this was created in, it should probably go to some kind of other Linux/Unix grant providing thing... Maybe to start ups, or as University Scholarship money...

Heh. Maybe I should ask Benjamin... *eyes clock* Stupid 10 hour time difference.

Send it to me.

[rice_burners_suck]

Simply write me a check for the entire amount, and I will see to it that it will be put to good use. You can rest assured that many a free software project will benefit greatly if a check is written to me and mailed right away.

Please make payable and mail to:

Rice Burners Suck
12345 South Rodder Street
Chevy Rocks, Florida 54321
USA

Thanks.

Me

[Beuno]

/me raises his hand

Buy shares in Microsoft

[rh2600]

Or Apple perhaps? Start getting some advocacy on the inside, if you will.

LokiGames

[biryokumaru]

Clearly it should go to restarting LokiGames.

They're an administrative entity, right?

Create an OSS challenge?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've all heard of the ansari X-prize, and in the 30s there were prizes to be had as well. Why not create a same prize for a software project?
Something that demonstrates the best combination of UI with code maintenance, or whatever else we can think of. Maybe have the OSDL award the prize, or some other big OSS figure, that is not a private company.
What do you think?

419 it obviously

[carldot67]

Dear Dr Obedience Oleweh

I am Mr Lyman from Linux Credit Card. Recently the business was closed due to an unfortunate incident, leaving 126,000 (ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX THOUSAND) US DOLLAR in the account.
I cannot get these funds to their ritghful owners as I am listed as the official company solicitor. Therefore I need a trusted associate with Western Union Credit transfer to do it for me.
If you do this small job for me you will be able to keep half (SIXTY-THREE THOUSAND) US DOLLAR in your bank account.
For your security I need to set up the right bank transfer in your name. Please send me your local bank detail in Lagos right away plus a Western Union Bank money transfer of 500.00 US DOLLAR to cover my costs. I cannot be seen to pay the costs myself you understand as it would appear on the accounts.
God be with you and peace my brother.
My Lyman
New York, USA.

who invited roblimo to this dance?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original article has nothing about LinuxFund dissolving or giving away all its money in this manner.

Seems like Roblimo is trying to take credit for something that a) has not been offered and b) not assured of happening.

Plus, it's really pathetic he needs to spin shit like this in order to get onto slashdot. bravo to rob and jeff for banning his sorry trailer-park ass from slashdot.

Start a trust fund - like PBS

[surfcow]

PBS used to be almost completely dependent on congress. Now it is not. Individuals / organizations who want to contribute can do so with confidence. And they do. It gives people a concrete target for their generosity.

I know, $126K is nothing. Think of it as seed money. How many of us would leave a few sheckels in our wills to an OSS trust-fund? I would. It adds up.

Have a small committee decide on how to preserve and use the money to best serve the OSS community.

When the unexpected legal expenses occur (the next SCO), draw from this area. Use it to help continue vital but non-glamerous projects. Use it for counter-lobbying in Washington. Worthy international charities. OSS-friendly academic programs. Purchasing closed software projects to open, as blender was.

Someone feel like authoring a manifesto, writing up a plan? Make this real, do it right and I will give money to it. And you might too.

=brian

Re:Start a trust fund - like PBS

[Mike Buddha]

The problem is that you still need to hire competent people to run the operation. Therein lies the problems that LinuxFund had...

Give it to feed some starving children

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit.

There are more hungry children living under conditions of the most heart-rending, abject poverty in parts of Africa and Asia than this mere $126,155.29 could even begin to properly help.

But it could at least help put some nutritious meals in the bellies or buy medicine for some of them for a little while anyway.

I suggest give it all to some organization like World Vision of one of the other legitimate charities who do the same kinds of things.

A mere $30 could feed a child for a month, or buy enough antibiotics to save the lives of a couple kids with bacterial pneumonia.

Think about it tonight while you stuff your face with pizza sitting in front of your PC playing Warcraft.

Re:Give it to feed some starving children

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm lactose-intolerant, you insensitive clod!

One Word...

[Mike Buddha]

POWERBALL!

The Best People For The Job

[Anonymous Coward]

I nominate Halliburton to handle the account. Or maybe Dick Cheney. They've both proven themselves to be unpartisian contenders for the world's greater good, haven't they? ...

*sigh*

[daikokatana]

Oh very well: just give it to me, I'll take it.

State university, folks!

[Grendel Drago]

Really? I went through the US university system, and graduated with about $4,000 in debt, having paid about $2,000 in while I was still there. (I was on scholarship; I only paid for room and board. I would be nearly debt-free if they hadn't killed the Pell Grant program.)

Even if I hadn't been on scholarship, the cost of going there and living on campus is somewhere around $8,000 a year.

What, you have something against going to a state university?

--grendel drago

Re:State university, folks!

[drsquare]

I have something against paying 8k a year. Remember not everyone gets a scholarship. At that price a normal person is looking at $30k of debt. What a great start to life that is.

What, you have something against going to a state university?

Surely all the more renowned US universities are private? A university is about more than just education, it's about getting a name on your CV so you can get a job from the PHB who spent four years at some elite university and only gives jobs to people who went to the same 'fraternity'.

Re:State university, folks!

[Grendel Drago]

Well, that's also assuming that they don't get a job while they're at college, and that they have absolutely no means of paying for it themselves at the time whatsoever---no parents, no nothing. Remember, $8k is the entire cost of living. If you get a student labor job, it's possible to make about a thousand bucks a semester to put toward the cost of schooling.

And if the cost still offends you, the first two years can be done from home, at a local community college, at a fraction of the cost; plenty of folks transfer in from a two-year program.

Oh, and many state universities are just as well-renowned as their private counterparts. Remember that UC Berkeley is a state school, and, for instance, the University of Connecticut has one of the best civil engineering programs in the country.

--grendel drago

Re:State university, folks!

[drsquare]

Even if you make a couple of thousand a year, that's still 6k of debt. And depending on where you get the loan, the interest could mean you're paying it off for decades. How many parents can afford 8k per year? I know that slashdot is generally full of rich kids, but in the real world, many families are lucky to have 1k a year spare after living costs.

And if the cost still offends you, the first two years can be done from home, at a local community college,

I'm afraid I don't know about this community college thing. If it's as good as a normal university then why not stay the whole time at the community college? How much does it cost in comparison?

Oh, and many state universities are just as well-renowned as their private counterparts.

Then why does anyone bother going to the private ones?

Re:State university, folks!

[Grendel Drago]

Even if you make a couple of thousand a year, that's still 6k of debt. And depending on where you get the loan, the interest could mean you're paying it off for decades. How many parents can afford 8k per year? I know that slashdot is generally full of rich kids, but in the real world, many families are lucky to have 1k a year spare after living costs.

A commonly-bandied figure is that the average lifetime income increase from a college education is a million bucks or so. Paying back $8,000 over ten years at an average of 5% a year interest leads to a total of about $13,000, or $1,300 a year. The median income differential between having and not having a bachelor's degree is more than ten times that.

Unless one is a goddamned idjit, one will also take advantage of the subsidized Stafford loans offered by the feds, which currently have an interest rate of 3.37%, which isn't exactly extortionate.

I'm afraid I don't know about this community college thing. If it's as good as a normal university then why not stay the whole time at the community college? How much does it cost in comparison?

Learn. Community colleges only provide the first two years of education; they don't do all four years. And, indeed, many low-income students attend community college for the two years that they can. Community colleges are somewhat like extended high schools.

In comparison, community college costs about (random sample here) $100 a credit. Which is $300 a course, I would reckon, or about $1500 a semester. On the other hand, it looks like those particular guys waive tuition for in-state students.

Then why does anyone bother going to the private ones?

Beats me. I got a tuition waiver to state school---my state has a free-ride program for anyone graduating in the top five percent of their class with above a 1400 SAT score or something like that, so I just paid for fees, room and board. They also have programs where they'll pay half tuition for high school graduates in the top ten percent with scores above 1200 and so forth.

I suppose that's not particularly helpful for the other ninety percent of high school graduates, however.

But no, I can't give you a damned reason why anyone would choose to go to, say, Boston University ($29k/year not including room and board) instead of UMass Boston ($4k/year; I don't think they have dorms).

--grendel drago

Re:State university, folks!

[drsquare]

A commonly-bandied figure is that the average lifetime income increase from a college education is a million bucks or so. Paying back $8,000 over ten years at an average of 5% a year interest leads to a total of about $13,000, or $1,300 a year.

OK, it's not 8k. Assuming a four year course, that's $32k. Secondly, a million over a lifetime would be approximately $25k per year. I'm sure it's closer to 5k or 10k per year. Take tax away from that, and it's not very high. Interest is usually higher than 5%, hell even some bank accounts give 5%. You're looking more at 10-15%, especially with credit cards. That's assuming you get a loan or a credit card. If you can't, where does the 32k come from? And I've heard of US students with near to 100k of debt. And it's assuming you get to walk into a high-paid job straight away. In the current climate, that's not very likely, just look at all the people with degrees working minimum wage jobs.

so I just paid for fees, room and board

What other costs are there? That covers pretty much all the major costs. $1.5k per semester is still $3k per year. Add accomodation and living costs and you're back to $8k per year. Where is the saving, other than the reduced education quality and having to live in the shit-hole state you come from?

The World Wind Project could use that.

[AnswerIs42]

They are looking for donations of money/hardware or hosting for the non-NASA side of it.

What could be a better use of that money to open up more imagery of Europe and Asia for ALL to see.

Important tasks that won't get done otherwise.

[Grendel Drago]

There are frequent complains that open source coders only do fun work, not boring-but-important work. It's one of the biggest weak spots in open source, isn't it? Every month or so, there's an editorial pointing out that good software requires gruntwork, and that since this stuff is written from the goodness of our hearts, it won't get done.

Whoever ends up administering the fund should use it to fund boring tasks that no one wants to do, but that will increase the overall quality of any free project.

Anyone remember what these tasks were, by the way?

--grendel drago

Hire some GOOD people...

[Cinquero]

...to fix a few extremely tricky bugs in Firefox and other products...

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear Debian needs the money. Let's give it to them on the condition they really release at the end of the month.

Stung by MBNA

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of MBNA's business practices, I folded our LinuxFund cards into an airplane and then torched it with a soldering iron.

Proof that programmers aren't good businessmen

[bergeron76]

I think this is further proof that Linux/OSFS types are not successful at business.

They suffer from Ethics!

(switching to Vizzini voice)

EVERYBODY KNOWS that in a situation like that you steal the money and don't try to help the community! Linux will never survive! There's no money in it! See, I told you SO! There are 2 things you never do: One is fight a land war in Asia, and the other is Trust a LinuxMan with Money!

HAHAHAHA! MYUHAHAHA!
(falls over dead)

Fund a Summer of Code for high-schoolers

[koko775]

Too many of us were ignored by Google because of the legal hassles involved in under-18 participants. :

I have one of these cards

[dg41]

And well dammit, I want my money back!

Bounties!

[Dysan2k]

Frankly, I'd like to see it go to either bounties, purchasing mass-licensing for some codec that would be beneficial to open source, or maybe paying a hardware vendor to put together driver-level specs for their product line. I think that's one of the reasons a lot doesn't get released because someone has to spend the time putting the info together and that costs the company money.

Just my $.02

Realism

[mattr]

I have donated effort to a non-profit for several years, which is run by a hard-nosed journalist. It is amazing how much can get done (build 200 schools, a hospital, an orphanage, a newspaper company, attracting donations of $250,000 for food, 2000 boxes of clothing, corporate alliances from major newspapers and manufacturers, ...) by one experienced guy (the journalist, Bernie Krisher) who hates spending money and is good at getting donations and assistance.

My recommendations:

1. Discuss the problem with well-known people involved in finance and nonprofits, and maybe lawyers of FSF. Though FSF is not just about linux I think it is a good idea.
2. Money should not be completely consumed, but should be made into a fund (hence LinuxFund) and the annual interest used for awards.
3. Make a new fund for open source software development, maybe call it the "Open Software Fund". The LinuxFund money up to now and in the future is put into this fund. This will allow other revenue streams to be created to grow the principal, and the increased size of the fund will make it easier to pay for administration/overhead (though this should be kept as close to zero as possible).
4. Get corporate and private moneys into this fund. It's a tax writeoff! Think about how much companies spend on opening booths in software fairs and this is a drop in the ocean. Every OSS-related fair could also have a donations box too, and publishers or users of OSS related software/documentation might like to get a tax break by donating too. Allow donations to specify certain uses, for example you could put a box for development of language-learning software at a school fair, etc.
5. Who gets fund money is beyond this thread. But here are three possibilities:
   a. $1000 per project is a lot for the third world but not much for advanced economies. Instead consider allocating a percentage of the available interest based on votes, judging, or best yet actual needs of the project. How the money is used should be monitored. There can be a reporting requirement and money could be allocated on a quarterly or biannual basis to the same project depending on progress.
   b. Like the Perl Foundation, money could be used to hire the services of great developers, business people, documentation writers, or illustrators to work solely on behalf of this Fund or particular projects.
   c. In the U.S. at least, it is common practice to contribute to politicians (senators, etc.) who match your views, and in this case you want people with political clout to increase the uptake of OSS, push software freedom, and increase jobs for OSS developers. Consider paying for development of materials, or partial financial support for a person, who would be able to push this agenda with politicians.
6. Finally, a web team (programmer, illustrator, writer, producer) should be assembled (donating their efforts but posting their names on the site). The object of the site they create should be:
   a. Clearly explain objective of fund, how it is managed, tax writeoff status, voting and judging results, applications for funding, and results of funding.
   b. To create a feedback loop using an mailing list archive, screenshots of apps, photos of developer teams, photos of donators, video clips, case studies of how projects are being used by users and why for example the funded addition will be useful, etc., all frequently updated. This will allowing individuals and companies to see the results of their efforts and build a positively reinforced cycle. I used this method several years ago to raise a quarter million dollars for an ngo providing disaster food aid, including email to the project and responses to the email, a list of who each donator was and how much they donated, faxes, photos, videos, diaries of trips to the location and how food was distributed, and periodic reports. Also in our schools program we name the school after the donator and post a photo of the named school. Also, the World Bank contributes

umm.. no brainer...

[qnxdude]

1) use it to fight software patents. If you want to see linux continue to thrive, this evil must be stopped. 2) use it to fight GPL infringement 3) ? 4) happiness

FSF

[alexborges]

Give it to the FSF to take a more aggressive stance in prosecuting GPL violations...

NO, this is not a joke.

Site down

[space_in_your_face]

The LinuxFund Web site was down for several months...
Front page of slashdot. This will help...

SPI

[bfree]

I'm surprised nobody has mention Software in the Public Interest as a possible distributor. They have everything in place and while the association with Debian is strong, I would be very surprised if they would not be able to allocate these funds to important projects without being accussed of simply funneling it into Debian.

Buy linux

[saskboy]

Buy old Koreans or Soviet Russians box versions of Linspire and Red Hat Linux.

Give it to OSS...

[Palal]

Give it to Google to distribute for this summer's OSS internship program.

Linux Research foundations

[Lotharjade]

Well, have it go to creating a Linux research foundation. Money for students, professors that want to study Linux in various research projects or use Linux to perform said projects on the desktop. It would inspire engineers and scientists to come up with devices that use linux AND to integrate research programs with linux. That would be AWESOME.

Linux is Ugly

[stuartbowes]

All the versions of Linux that I have used or even looked at have been ugly! I understand fully that all the prettynesses are the things that slow your machine down and all that, so fair enough, but having an OS that looks as dated as windows 95 is not appealing to me. This is a shame because I really like the idea of an open-source OS; however I also like style and good design - I am no programmer but Im sure that a 'pretty' could be made to run lightly. Surely that is the case? Maybe I just havent seen the right Distribution yet (or chosen the right GUI to go with it) Does anyone know of a Linux that compares to XP in terms of looks (obviously this is not a problem in terms of performance but performance isnt always everything when you use your PC to present things to people) I have to admit I dont really understand the GUI part of linux but I know you can change it - KDE, Gnome etc etc. If someone can tell me which of these looks nice I'll be more likely to get on the case of downloading a copy of Linux and saying "screw windows" for the rest of time. Windows IS, after all, totally parp.

Give it to me :-)

[RobotII]

I'm getting married this summer and could really do with some money. http://www.robotii.co.uk/