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Funding Open Source By Donations: Lighting the Path

Posted by timothy on from the getting-things-done dept.

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."

6 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Sooo.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nooo.. your publishing here in hopes of garnering further donations.. And the more that do similar the less profitable it is for the individual.

  2. step one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:step one by kthreadd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This doesn't make any sense. If it is HIS source code, then there's no such thing as "holding it hostage". He wants to make his software available under a free and open source license, yet he don't want to loose the income that he needs. Why is this offending? Why is it so wrong that someone else prefers to actually make a living rather than doing the hard work just for the good of it? What you are asking him is basically that he should donate his time and money to you, and hope that you might be generous enough to pay him back a little.

  3. Ahead of our time by sqrt(2) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
  4. That's nice... by darkfeline · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. It's a great idea by cshark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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