Slashdot Mirror
Crowdfunding Open Source Software Enhancements and Bug Fixes
flok writes "It's nice when your open source pet project is popular, but sometimes the constant stream of feature requests can be intimidating. The CatInCan website aims to help prioritize a project owner's efforts while letting them make some money on the side. Think of it as a Kickstarter-variant where people can raise funds to get functionality in software realized, or maybe to get that long-ignored bug fixed."
so the longer i put off the bug fix, the more money I earn when I dinally do fix it!?
This is of interest to me since at my day job we're trying to (advertisement warning) crowdfund our new email client.
We talked about funding individual ticket bounties, but that didn't make sense to us. For one thing, a lot of code changes aren't easily ticketable -- or the ticketing itself is a lot of work, i.e. planning meetings are required. It doesn't seem fair to pay for the programming but not the planning.
But the big problem is this: how do you get continuous enough funding to have a staff, an office, health plans, etc. when you're doing individual bounties? The funding seems like it wouldn't be stable enough to support the company.
I'd also point out that this very idea has been tried several times already, never with much success.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I mean, part of the appeal of open source to me has always been the collaborative process of building a piece of software. Monetizing the process kind of kills the dream.
Like the above poster mentioned, this has been tried before. I can't see it working out, not do I hope it does.
Sounds reasonable. Here are the projects I'd like to see gain more traction: Pynum, Blender, Bullet Physics .. and documentation thereof
Well, I think a devs dream would be that the community would help supporting a project without having to focus on specific issues, although from the ones I've seen, such as the PyDev crowdfunding: http://igg.me/at/liclipse and the PyPy crowdfunding: http://pypy.org/ , I think the model that seems to work is having both, a 'general' funding and putting on something targeted too so that it can get a wider audience...
Still, after working on software projects for some time, I think the real work is more on the little things (and the sum of those little things is what the community wants... so, in this light, I'm not sure that this would be the better funding approach).
Maybe a mix of those could work... say doing a funding just to keep the project going and as a side effect of that people would get votes to help deciding the projects future...
I clicked on the link to https://www.catincan.com/ and got the following error ---
Error
The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.
Error message
/srv/www/catincan.cvalka.com/public_html/webroot/includes/lock.inc).
PDOException: SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Tnw commercial for PBS fundraising says "If PBS didn't do it, who would?" Discovery Channel History Channel TLC Science Channel Animal Planet etc. It was their own advertising which got me thinking that maybe it isn't necessary for them yo forcibly take money from everyone's paychecks. ( PBS is partially taxpayer funded.)
But the big problem is this: how do you get continuous enough funding to have a staff, an office, health plans, etc. when you're doing individual bounties? The funding seems like it wouldn't be stable enough to support the company.
I'd guess that less than 1% of OSS projects have an office and a health plan. For the 99%.that include people doing it in their spare time, being able to make a little extra money contributing to OSS would sure encourage me to do more.
If hobby programmers are already working for free, offering to pay them makes no sense.
And while "less than 1%" of open source software might be made by professional developers, that tiny little fraction of open source software is what people actually use: Firefox, Linux, Chrome, Android, etc. etc.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
There already been plenty of open-sourced email clients out there, some of the projects are in hibernation mode
Is there a need to invent yet-another-email client ?
I saw the Blender logo on the website in the tree. So, search for 'blender'. No results found. Yes, Blender is open source, but it does not seem 'a customer' so to speak.
Bidforfix claims to be a similar platform but their only project seems to be Osmand so far.
Nice idea, but it only adds value if the site can be trusted to be independent of the project. Otherwise, just give money to the project (in this case Blender and Osmand, which both seem to be managed well).
* http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110514070546/http://elveos.org/ the source of which is available at https://github.com/BloatIt/bloatit
* http://selfstarter.us/
This catincan business seems nice enough until you notice a Facebook like button on the page. The 0-click variant, no less.
Most OSS projects get basically no funding.
Can you give examples of significant OSS projects that get no funding?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Look at PowerDNS. They have been successfully doing open source development with paid developers since probably the earliest start. Other companies have variations on this theme.
Getting a crowdsourcing website set up to facilitate relatively unknown projects to advertise for backers is a logical follow up to this. I doubt that it will be profitable for the people setting up the crowdsourcing, since a lot of projects are not going to get any relevant backing because they simply aren't grown up enough to be useful. Starting a program from scratch with crowd sourced money will be much harder than to get money to get a nice feature in an already popular program.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Most OSS projects get basically no funding.
Can you give examples of significant OSS projects that get no funding?
define 'significant'
Ggedanken experiment, take one hobby programmer who maintains an OSS project. Let's assume they have a garden which needs the lawn cutting once a week, and general maintenance. Takes couple hours a week for six months of the year, lets say 80 hours a year for round figures. Perhaps if someone where giving him money to work on his hobby aka the OSS project he could afford to get in a gardener and spend that time on his hobby.
In theory, yes. But you picked a particularly bad example with gardening. A programmer whose hobby is programming really needs that little exercise he would get from gardening. Replacing it with more programming will lead to his brain rotting, and his programming skills declining rapidly.
Why?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If hobby programmers are already working for free, offering to pay them makes no sense.
Unless, of course, you want them to do more, or to do something specific, like code a feature you want. I contribute to Moodle, an open source learning management system. I have some use for a certain feature, but not enough to get me to actually code it. When another user mentioned getting three or four people to contribute to a bounty I said I'd code it if they came up with $100. (I'd get the $100 plus the benefit of being able to use the feature, worth $30 to me.) Without the bounty, I won't spend time to code that feature. With the bounty, I would.
GP here. You have a point about the crab fishing and UFOs. On the other hand, Discovery Networks alone has four or five channels and just the Discovery Network channels alone have more good stuff (combined) than PBS does, simply because they have several such channels. So I'd say that Discovery Network replaces PBS, plus there are the other, non-affiliated channels.
More importantly, Discovery doesn't forcibly take my paycheck. PBS doesn't just have to be good, it has to be so essential that they are justified in taking our rent money, backed by force of arms if needed. That's a high bar.
Don't want your paycheck taken? Move to Antarctica and telecommute.
That's a rationalization, at best. You're still expecting people to work for free for the benefit of others.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."