The FSF Adopts the Kickstarter Approach To Fund-raising

New submitter ChronoEngineer writes "Recently the Free Software foundation launched a new fund-raising system starting with the GNU MediaGoblin project. Rewards from its new tiered donation reward system include physical objects such as a 3D print of the project's mascot as well as digital ones (Rewards List). This gives free software projects an alternative crowd-funding source where all of their contributions go to advancing free software, since the administrative cut taken from the earnings goes to the Free Software Foundation. Chris Webber, of GNU Mediagoblin, mentions this as one of the reasons he chose the FSF over Kickstarter for his project."

Comments

The perfect solution to DMCA notices

[Nushio]

With all the stupid DMCA notices that seem to take down thousands of sites and videos at once, by mistake, the best solution seems to be self-hosted. It's much less likely that you'll receive a DMCA notice and at least you can act on it on your own decision, not some automated tool's.

If there wasn't a single "Youtube" but a thousand or a million "Youtubes"... well, the Internet might survive a bit longer.

Re:The perfect solution to DMCA notices

[Nushio]

Whoever modded me offtopic seemed to miss my point: MediaGoblin (The software being "kick-started") is an image/video self-hosting solution. The more sites there are, the harder it is to censor them all.

Re:The perfect solution to DMCA notices

[tlhIngan]

It's much less likely that you'll receive a DMCA notice and at least you can act on it on your own decision, not some automated tool's.

Here's the tricky bit. If you're hosting it off your broadband, the DMCA notice goes to your ISP who then decides if they want to cut you off or not.

If it's on a hosted box you rent, your hosting provider gets the notice and they take it down. Like what happened to Edublogs.

And with the multiplicative power, doing it to a bunch of comcast subscribers only takes say one, notice.

Re:The perfect solution to DMCA notices

[ThatsMyNick]

If it's on a hosted box you rent, your hosting provider gets the notice and they take it down. Like what happened to Edublogs.

And lendink. Even though the takedown notices were not legitimate, the provider decided to intervene as they could not handle the flood of DMCA requests.

Re:The perfect solution to DMCA notices

[TheRaven64]

The difference is, if it goes to a company with whom you have a business relationship that involves you paying them, then they have an incentive to do due diligence. If it goes to a site like YouTube, which gains no direct income from you, then they have no incentive to do anything other than just take it down and let you deal with it. Allowing hosts to charge a $50 processing fee for every DMCA takedown notice would also go a little way towards helping this.

This is not the Kickstarter model.

[kfogel]

This is not the Kickstarter model. It's just accepting directed donations toward a project (and MediaGoblin is certainly a fine cause!).

The Kickstarter model is the "Threshold Pledge" system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system). It means you set a threshold, a minimum fundraising goal, and all the funders pledge amounts toward that goal. Until the goal is reached, the pledges are either not called in, or are held in escrow to be returned in the event the goal is not reached. That way, everyone who gives money knows that, if their money reaches the recipient, then the recipient got enough to actually accomplish what it is trying to do. If the recipient doesn't get enough pledged to reach the goal, then no one loses their money.

It is designed to solve the problem of "I'd love to donate to X, but only if I know that enough other people will donate for X to be sustainable / achievable / whatever." In economics, it's called an "assurance contract".

What the FSF is doing here is not the threshold pledge system. It's just accepting directed donations.

Re:This is not the Kickstarter model.

[paroneayea]

Heya Karl,

You're right, it isn't the "threshold pledge" system, and it is directed donations in a large way. Even so, when we had the conversations with the FSF initially about the campaign, the conversation was really a "Are we going with the FSF or with Kickstarter?" type of conversation, and what we said was "we'd like to go with you, but there's a whole set of things that Kickstarter does that you don't yet." But the FSF implemented them, retooling a ton of their infrastructure specifically for this campaign: the list of rewards that you can select from, a progress bar that auto-updates as the campaign goes along, the list that you get subscribed to when donating so you can hear updates as the project goes along, and a bunch of other things: these are things that Kickstarter had that the FSF didn't, but the FSF developed those tools so that they can better support campaigns that run in this way for free software projects.

So you're right that it's not an assurance contract system, but there are other crowdfunding platforms that have been on the rise that have been (rightly) lumped together when describing the rise of project crowdfunding. And the campaign that we set out is one that fits the type of patterns that projects fundraising under those systems have been using. So while it's not an assurance contract system, I think it's also incorrect to redcuce Kickstarter and friends to just assurance contracts. And the fact that the FSF did significant retooling of its infrastructure to reflect those changes is I think quite noteworthy.

Re:I'm a fan of the FSF

[Inconexo]

Only that the name was not set by the FSF. Indeed, they were using that name (without the GNU prefix) before they joined the GNU project.

If you knew RMS as you think you do, you'll know that name doesn't match his pattern.