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Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path
New submitter BryanLunduke writes "One week ago I Open Sourced my — previously commercial — software (GPL) and comic books (creative commons). I am now documenting my journey to fully fund their continued development with the first week's results of funding via donations. I am publishing this information here to give others the facts they need to help decide if they can afford to do something similar."
Nooo.. your publishing here in hopes of garnering further donations.. And the more that do similar the less profitable it is for the individual.
have a better track record than bryan lunduke.
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/06/pulling-a-lunduke-holding-source-code-hostage/
this same guy has been discussed here at /. previously
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/02/07/028253/ask-slashdot-can-closed-source-software-transition-to-the-gpl-successfully
Now, at last you can contribute to something we've all wanted - a new FreeDOS distro. You can support his 20-line BBS via Telnet. Read his web comic. Play his text adventure game. And there's an "app creator" program.
Not sure whether this is cute or pathetic.
If it needs to be funded, maybe it shouldn't be free... or it should be beneficial to society or something.
I mean there's free as in charity, then there's free as in street performer. Which side of that should free-as-in-money software really be on? If you pull the attitude that you're doing everyone a favor, you know.. sometimes free isn't good enough, that's all.
FLOSS might actually turn out to be, in the long view of human existence and intellectual development, vastly ahead of its time.
FLOSS, henceforth "open source" as this term is far more linguistically charming regardless of legalistic accuracy, is a mindset and way of conducting one's life that might actually be too soon in coming. It appear at once to be imminently practical, fair, and compassionate. Who among us that wishes good for all mankind would want otherwise for their life's work? Yet this very question belies the problem inherit therein: the creators do in fact have a lifetime, temporally finite in a way which is not of their own choosing. Death is, currently, a certainty, which makes the human work-hour a unit of absolute importance if we are to value anything at all. It is from this work-hour from which our ability to support offspring comes--a topic I have heard Mr. Lunduke speak of adamantly to a certain RMS. Certainly he has the right to provide for his children and relatives, yet all would also assert society does not have the obligation to same. Whence comes the compromise? It is, of course, to be found in the production of useful work unique to said individual. A program is paid for his work sufficiently only because his work is sufficiently difficult to perform.
But what happens when it is not? This conversation is not even ongoing in our society. We are not even considering a world when humans are eclipsed by machines, automation, and computation. We are not even having the conversation of what society will look like when all but the most brilliant among us are capable of performing useful work.
Open source is a brilliant lurch toward the end state of utopia, but it does nothing to connect the dots from our current state to that promised land. These problems will be solved by thinkers greater than I or Lunduke or perhaps anyone else currently living, but they either will be solved or the human race will stagnate or regress to feudalism.
I hope for progress, efficiency, and a preservation of the human spirit manifest in expressions of beauty, art, order, and exquisitely flawed form. What philosophy guides us thus? What but Open Source, the sharing of the structure of life and the universe itself, can even prepare us for this nirvana? It isn't a question of whether open source is better than the alternatives, it is a question of whether open source is better than abject failure and darkness.
It is.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
This looks like fun.
Is there an open source version of this?
Does Slashdot get a percentage of the money you bring in? Why else would they post this story?
Frankly, Lunduke's projects are quite simple, so it's okay to let the genie out of the bottle. The donation model works here perfectly: throw a couple of dimes in the guitar case if you find them cool. At the same time, indie game devs can use them as good learning material.
That's nice, but is this kind of blatant self-promotion allowed on /.? This is not your personal blog. Can't we abide by the secondary source rule that Wikipedia has, so that we can guarantee some degree of notability? If you've finished your study and it caught someone else's eye because it's well-written and interesting and they post it here, cool, but "Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path", really? You are not the first person to do this, sorry to burst your narcissistic bubble.
I don't think I'm speaking out of term when I say we've all created these little silly games and tools when we were just learning how to program. And, like me, we've probably all tried to make a bit of money from it, got some bucks from family or neighbors and occasionally even something from a kind stranger.
Some set up a lemonade stand (do children actually still do this) or a little "shop" at the side of the road, others do stuff like this.
Don't be too harsh on the kid, he's just trying to turn his hobby into something useful. Most kids his age would just be causing trouble in the neighborhood or playing soccer or softball at best.
Atleast he's learning something that might be useful when he grows up.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
lunduke.com expired on 5/31/2013. His timing for self-promotion couldn't be better.
You don't seam to like the idea that you are free to do what you want with the things you create. Instead you would like Bryan to just give you whatever he produces as charity, because that's how all the software you use is produced. Everything is just an apt-get away. Oh wait, looks like someone actually wants to make money on his software while at the same time making an effort in contributing to free and open source. That's just sick. How dare he do something like that?
Or you behave as a grownup and thank Bryan for his contributions; takes it or leaves it.
nah, I think I'm just going to tell him to eat a dick for his ransomware. Bryan, eat another dick for this guy too.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
https://github.com/BryanLunduke/
It is available on GitHub. Take it or leave it.
Bryan, I think I'll chose to leave it. Your past actions have sullied any interest I have in your crapware.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
except that it never happens.
Awhile back, I donated $15 to a fairly widely used open source program. I got the nicest thank you letter from the author. Turns out, that in the five years he had been soliciting donations on his website, that I had been the second person in the history of the project to donate anything to it. This program had over a million downloads, by the way. With this in mind, I made sure to donate small amounts to other open source projects I wanted to see keep going. Out of six of them, I received four letters stating basically the same thing. Maybe times have changed, and maybe oss software writers have become savvier when it comes to things like mailing lists and social media for soliciting. Crowd funding certainly has changed the way these things work as well. But in general, I suspect that things are probably the same as they've ever been. And that simply asking for donations just doesn't work.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Yes, that's pretty my experience with AUCTeX as well. About 4 donations in about 8 years, something like 200+50+10+10 (the 200 being billed to some college institute using the software).
Currently I am living off working on GNU LilyPond, and the way this works (at a rather modest pay level) is basically community blackmail: I've made very clear on the project mailing list that the project was siphoning off enough of my time that I'd either need to get paid for it, or stop working on it completely.
So far, this arrangement has worked for somewhat more than a year. The project is without convincing competition among Free Software (and actually also gives most commercial software a run for the money), and I am by far the most active developer (about 25% of the current commits). The financing model is incestuous in that the largest amounts come from people already heavily investing their own time into the project, and the payment structure is such that without those largest amounts the financing would break down.
There are things like a priest taking his vow of poverty and dispersing with some of his last money by handing it over to the project which helps him create printouts of music large enough for his brethren of worse eyesight.
Or people making a small inheritance and handing several thousands over. Or the original creators of the project supporting me. Or one of my largest regular supporters also being one of the most helpful power users on the mailing list (because much of his power became accessible through my work).
And with all that, I get about a fourth of what I last made in a "regular" job before taxes. And it really requires sending out monthly reports of what has been done, with the implicit plea to keep up or increase the level of support. Miss one such report, and donations easily drop by 30% next month.
Now both work and payment are strictly on contingency base: I am not playing access games of any sort. People don't pay me for past work, but in the expectation of work to continue, work that is then accessible to everyone. I can't deny that playing games with accessibility (like the Ardour project does for its financing, providing binary downloads only to paying customers while the sources are accessible under a free license) are reasonably successful, but they are just not what I want to be doing.
Not that I would be able to do so here since this is a multi-author project, but I also did not do this for projects fundamentally my own.
The development for this excellent program has stalled and finally ceased. The source is posted and it's a great program - I'd like some recommendations of software like it. It takes just about any video format and loads it up into an easy to use step by step DVD video format for burning onto a DVD and watching on your computer or regular stand alone DVD player. It has no ads, works well, but could use some polishing.