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."

Comments

Not so sure about this.

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Not so sure about this.

[cheater512]

Crowd funding a company is inherently stupid.
The company has to be able to stand on its own two feet.

This comes in only if the company doesn't really have a interest in a feature but a user with cash does.

Re:Not so sure about this.

[Tigris666]

I'd also point out that this very idea has been tried several times already, never with much success.

I worked on a project called Fundry, that was exactly this. Developers could add projects and setup paypal etc attached to it, then users could "put their money where their mouth is" so to speak and directly fund features they wanted. The idea being features would pay for themselves and developers wouldn't end up implementing features nobody wanted.

But alas it ended up failing, as the poster above mentioned, we weren't the first to try it, kickstarter beat us to the bunch by about 2 weeks but we continued on hoping we were targetting a different market than kickstarter.

We ended up open sourcing the code in case someone else wanted to run with the idea, I wonder if the new mob used it at all? We'll probably never know.

Re:Not so sure about this.

[cheater512]

Bootstrapping a company no, but maintaining a company yes.

Re:Not so sure about this.

[MrEricSir]

Not at the federal level -- as of 2009, the IRS no longer gives nonprofit status to software companies.

Re:Not so sure about this.

[hairyfeet]

This is why I've said that FOSS really only works if you have a business plan that uses what I call "The blessed three" which is 1.-Sell support/services, 2.-Sell hardware, 3.-The tin cup, which of course this is the third of the three, because the traditional methods of making money off the software just doesn't work thanks to the GPL redistribution clause.

Is this a bad thing? No, in fact if you build around the blessed three you can make a LOT of money, just ask Red Hat, but what that means is you are gonna have a hard time keeping that email client funded if you can't figure out a way to use the blessed three because in FOSS the software is free in every sense of the word so traditional methods just don't work. This is why you've never seen a FOSS game with the depth and quality of a Bioshock despite all the free engines, this is why you've never seen a desktop with the level of polish of OSX or Windows, its because these things are VERY difficult to fit into the blessed three model.

So I wish you luck but its probably gonna be rough going unless you can figure out a way to fit into the blessed three, because desktop software like the desktop itself just isn't an easy fit into that model. Servers fit because there is always companies wanting this or that feature or this or that bug fixed and having direct access to the devs is a useful thing to have in that space, it works in embedded because its the hardware itself that brings the value, it can be a solid and lucrative business but like all business models you really have to conform to it, it can't conform to you.

Re:GitHub for the greedy?

[MrEricSir]

Monetizing the process kind of kills the dream.

Not being able to eat and pay rent might be *your* dream, but the rest of us actually want to get paid for our work.

Crowd funding no funding

[raymorris]

Most OSS projects get basically no funding. I work on code if and only if my need for it is more than the work it requires. If it would take $100 worth of time, but I only get $50 worth of benefit, I won't do it. On the other hand, if I get $50 worth of benefit AND I collect a $70 bounty, I'd do the work.

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.

Re:Crowd funding no funding

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Are you getting an error ?

[davester666]

Well, if you shoot them some money, they might just make their website work...

Other similar ventures

[Anonymous Coward]

* 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.

Variation on existing business model

[dutchwhizzman]

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.