Is Diaspora the Future of Free Software Funding?

Glyn Moody writes "Diaspora, the free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook, has been much in the news recently — not least because it has raised $170,000 in just a few weeks. But what's also interesting is the way they've raised that money: through a series of graded rewards for pledges of financial support. This is an approach adopted by some forward-thinking musicians: for example, Jill Sobule funded her last album in the same way, garnering $75,000 in pledges from fans. Is this a model that could be applied to other free software projects, or is it just a one-off?"

Comments

Pledges eh?

[Bobnova]

Every time they say pledges of financial support, i wonder how many people actually follow through and pay.

"Prior Art"

[bsDaemon]

How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives? Its just another thing you can get for free, but that if you feel has value to you, you can/should help fund so it doesn't go away... and you get prizes at various levels of contribution. It's been working since the 70s for NPR, it should work here, too, assuming the people involved in using the software aren't the same people who don't contribute to their local NPR/PBS station.

Re:"Prior Art"

[eldavojohn]

How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives?

The key difference seems to be that you are paying for something specific to this project. In NPR, you're paying for some future costs of running it but also by and large shows that are already filmed and done. You're helping keep the access up and running. In Diaspora and Sobule's cases, you're paying for the coming work. You're really funding the creation of this project. Both are pledges for the future but in this case you are instrumental in creation, not accessing what's already created. I suppose locally produced shows may enjoy your money but you're not attached solely to that project when you contribute. And you're often rewarded with non-personal items. A duffel bag? A coffee mug? An old DVD of WWII? Old crap they have laying around? Red Green signatures? (Note: I would actually enjoy the Red Green signature)

Diaspora has to ship 4,241 CDs, 3,267 bunches of "cool disaspora stickers", 2,488 t-shirts and then all the hosting and phone support in the remaining groups which isn't anything to sneeze at either. It's all personalized to the Diaspora project and you're a part of that project now.

That's my interpretation anyway.

Re:"Prior Art"

[s73v3r]

Studio time, sound engineers, money to live off of while you actually write the songs. These are things that come to mind.

This project is fundamental...

[alexandre]

This project (and others like it*) has to succeed, we need something that makes the net lean toward P2P as an organisational structure.

Without these types of fights the net is in the long term going to suffer a lot from corporate control and stifle people's ability to start new ventures.

* http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Project_Comparison

Got code?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll get excited about Diaspora when they actually start putting out code...

Re:Got code?

[xtracto]

It will be fun to see after the guys get their "first version" running and see all the "real world" issues they will get. IIRC Friendster got canned due to scalability issues.

IMHO the Diaspora guys have a "good idea", but it is still to be implemented. However I have seen a *lot* of people with lots of good ideas for software, unfortunately the implementation is what counts.

Best of luck to them anyhow.

Don't forget Blender

[MikeV]

IIRC, it's source code was purchased from the license holders and made open-source thanks to this same sort of thing.

major problem with social netwrk wannabees

[peter303]

In general people only are interested in joining the most popular network sites where their friends are also joining. So this means there can only be one or two leaders and a tremendous amount of inertia to change. Giants like MicroSoft and Google tried and failed several times. So reading articles like these are much like reading the weekly "next dethroning of Moore's law" articles: usually the first and last and last time they'll make the news.

Re:major problem with social netwrk wannabees

[nloop]

kind of like this story about the 800 lbs gorilla of myspace and a smaller wannabee... facebook. Friendster begat MySpace begat Facebook begat someone new. Sure, I agree it won't be Diaspora because they have a terrible name and haven't even started writing code yet, but there is no such thing as too big to fail on the interwebs.

People never thought Yahoo could be displaced in the search engine market in the late 90s either.

Other Projects

[LBArrettAnderson]

I realize that this article isn't really about diaspora itself, but I feel it's an obligation to point out that there are other, more promising and further along (nearly finished), projects out there, such as Appleseed, that have the same goal, and aren't being run by people with almost no experience.

Re:Other Projects

[Rogerborg]

To be fair, the Diaspora guys are now fully experienced and demonstrably successful at their core competency: marketing vapourware.

For small projects

[fermion]

I think for small projects with a existing fan/userbase this works well, and is really not new. I recall 20 years ago a local brother/sister rock duo sold t-shirts to raise money to make CDs. Chris Chandler, a folk singer, offered producer credit on his latest album in exchange for a smallish donation. I think the general populous is often willing to give money for small projects.

The problem comes in when the project get very successful and starts needed professional management. Now people are not paying to directly create product, but for support and management services. I may be willing to donate $20 so that some coder buy food while writing a device driver, or some artist can rent studio space to record and album, but I am willing to donate that money for an administrative assistant? I don't know.

this is the part that blew my mind:

[circletimessquare]

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/

That's the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go.
It's also an impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren't going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site.

they haven't started programming it!

"hey, i got a cool idea, wanna give me $115K?

holy the awesome power of media coverage batman

Re:this is the part that blew my mind:

[LBArrettAnderson]

Indeed. I don't understand why people keep giving them money. Give your money to a project that has actually been started (and actually close to being finished), like appleseed - http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/ .

Re:this is the part that blew my mind:

[Rogerborg]

And dude, they'll totally get around to open sourcing that real soon now, 'cause, man, they're all about the open source and shit, so just get all out of their faces and chill, bro.

Why?

[DogDude]

No, it won't work. There are enough people out there who will say "Why does this non-existent software company need my money?". This is pretty silly.

1. Why does anybody need hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop software? You're using a computer right now as you read it. Start coding. What's the money thing all about?

2. These people haven't gotten together as a group (that I'm aware of or have ever heard of) and done anything together. Why would I throw money at an unproven group(?) of people?

3. If an idea is good enough, people will expect to make money on a project and want to invest on their own. This guy wants to get free of Facebook control by writing an aggregator that collects Facebook data? This is truly moronic.

Good free, open source software is generally written by a brilliant person or group of people who do it because they can and they want to. Proprietary software will be backed by people expecting to make some kind of return on their investment. This is some horrible mash-up of those two ideas that nobody has managed to think through.

Where's the CODE?

[jjn1056]

They got all this cash and... is there a code repository or something?

Optimizing donations

[nacturation]

Interesting the way their donations are structured:

Pledge $10 or more
Get a CD, note, and a bunch of cool diaspora stickers

Pledge $25 or more
Get a CD, note, and a bunch of cool diaspora stickers, and a awesome diaspora t-shirt!

Pledge $50 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus 1 month free of our turnkey hosted service (when it becomes available), or free phone support for 1 month if you host your own.

Pledge $100 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus 3 month free of our turnkey hosted service (when it becomes available), or free phone support for 3 months if you host your own.

Pledge $350 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus 1 year free of our turnkey hosted service (when it becomes available), and free phone support for 1 year if you host your own.

Pledge $1,000 or more [5 only]
Get all of the above stuff, plus access to the nightly build server for Diaspora, so you can check out our progress all summer!

Pledge $2,000 or more [4 only]
Get everything above, plus we will send you a brand new computer fully configured so you can host your own Diaspora seed from right under your bed!

The actual physical goodies stop at $25, and every level after that is soft goods. When you have to send out a t-shirt at the $25 level and they're on the hook for international shipping costs, how much is actually left over for development?

I would have structured things a bit differently. Of course, this is with 20/20 hindsight with the knowledge that their project would get viral media coverage and the fundraising would exceed expectations.

Pledge $10 or more
Get an official sponsor certificate from the developers [really a PDF over email, no mailing expenses]

Pledge $25 or more
Get an official sponsor certificate, and a bunch of cool diaspora stickers

Pledge $50 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus an awesome diaspora coffee mug!

Pledge $100 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus a cool diaspora polo shirt!

Pledge $350 or more
Get all the above stuff, plus a rocking diaspora laptop courier bag!

Pledge $1,000 or more
[Something along the lines of what they did, but something tangible as well. I also would have upped the slots. Instead of 5 only, make it 50.]

Pledge $2,000 or more
[Something along the lines of what they did, but something tangible other than the computer. I also would have upped the slots. Instead of 4 only, make it 20.]

Pledge $10,000 or more
[Why not? Something special as a silver level sponsor.]

Pledge $25,000 or more
[Something special as a gold level sponsor.]

Pledge $50,000 or more
[Something special as a platinum level sponsor... possibly credit on the site?]

Pledge $100,000 or more
[Hey, why stop now? Appeal to peoples' greed. 1% founders shares or something along those lines. This puts a $10M valuation on the company which is amazing for something that's 4 guys and an idea of cloning the 800lb market-leading gorilla.]

Jewish diaspora

[tepples]

Sure, I agree it won't be Diaspora because they have a terrible name

It might become popular with Jews out of Israel.

Re:Jewish diaspora

[Apple Acolyte]

Glad someone brought this up already. Yes, diaspora primarily refers to the Jewish dispersal across the globe as a result of the Roman occupation and destruction of the Jewish commonwealth in the land of Israel. Diaspora literally means dispersion, and while it can refer to dispersals of other groups of people, the primary denotation of the term refers to the exile of the Jewish people. If others want to contest that, check out the definitions on m-w.com.

Why the project creators used this term for distributed funding of software and other projects is somewhat beyond me. They want to use an unconventional term for dispersal, but diaspora has a unique meaning and isn't really a term with a positive connotation.

Re:I'm not advocating Diaspora, but...

[dominion]

It was actually more like one year, although I was silently committing to the svn without doing much promotion for the year before that. We just couldn't get momentum going, so at some point, jobs and personal lives took over.

This time around, it's different, though. I have to thank the Diaspora* folks, even if they don't end up coding anything, they've really gotten people to start thinking about open source, distributed social networking. And that's a positive for everyone.

We're trying to raise money the same way Diaspora* did, using a similar website. I don't expect to get as much as they did, but I think it's definitely possible to meet the goal.

http://indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project

Re:I'm not advocating Diaspora, but...

[dominion]

I would never consider asking them for money (although I wouldn't turn it down if they offered :), but I did send them an email right before this storm hit, about working on a common protocol, but they never responded.