webmonkey.com — What would your favorite small open source project do with a sudden influx of money? Imagine you donated $5000 to a project, where would the money go? Less scrupulous developers might spend the money on Mountain Dew and Twinkies, but more likely the money would just sit, doing nothing.
Jul 30, 2008 View in Crawl 4
yargthepirateJul 30, 2008
apparently being nice = buried. +1 sir.
darkheroJul 31, 2008
This story was taken from coding horror: <a class="user" href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.h ...</a>Codinghorror is one of my favorite blogs.
dazparkourJul 31, 2008
I'd take you up on that -I use firefox - I doubt, with all the people they had, I would be much use there so ideally, a smaller project would benefit more from my time.I'd volunteer to help a small OSS project - I just don't see a lot with space. I DO check sourceforge's help wanted occasionally, still nothing.I imagine not everyone has a skill they can donate to a project however, in the meantime - looking for a code monkey, hit me up OSS!
hello1024Jul 31, 2008
It's time someone came up with an automated bounty system. Donations to a project are automatically added to a "bounty pot", which is then shared amongst a series of mini projects or tasks assigned by a project lead.The bounty system could be run by a company that does all the management - ie. it handles the money and doles it out to the right people when bounties are met. Project leaders could take money out themselves at any time, and donators could see directly which bounties their money has paid for. It would also take legal responsibility and deal with meeting country specific rules and regulations. The company itself would be supported by advertising, donations, or possibly even interest on bounties not yet met.If anyone would be interested in setting something like this up, contact omattos at g m a i l . com. I'm not going to develop this independently, since I can do software development, but don't think I have the skills to manage a project with this many aspects, but if a group of people are interested in this it might be a go'er.
kundasonAug 1, 2008
Funny, I posted a comment about how people never actually donate money to free software projects and it gets dugg out below the viewing threshold. People don't like to hear the truth about this subject and it is a sensitive issue both for developers and users.This article is misleading: It presents a distorted picture in which a "typical" generous user donates 5,000 USD just to find out the developer does not want the contribution. The truth is different. 99.9% of the users will never donate a single dollar in their life, the 0.1% who donate typically give 10-30 USD, no more, and there are many developers who desperately need the money.Take a look at a project like TortoiseSVN. It was downloaded from sourceforge 10,000,000 times. Take a look in the wayback machine and you will see that TortoiseSVN had 240 donors in 2007 (they removed the list from the site).I developed a tool used by many thousands of enthusiastic users yet even though I have asked directly for donation in several ways, to this day I only got one donation.I believe this is typical.To make things worse many developers think of donations or financial support as blasphemy. However, while this attitude is convenient if you are a bachelor student in your 20ies and have plenty of time and free nights to hack, it is often impossible for older professionals (with families to support) who also happen to consider themselves part of the Free Software community.What do you suggest? that Free Software programming be left for kids, corporates, and a handful of lucky superstar programmers?I find it ironic that these developers themselves have come to believe that the Free in Free Software means free-beer or no-money instead of free as in free speech. There should be nothing wrong in developing Free Software for a living. In fact this is also Richard Stallman's position and he explicitly addresses this issue in his writings: "There is a good reason for users of software to feel a moral obligation to contribute to its support. Developers of free software are contributing to the users’ activities, and it is both fair and in the long-term interest of the users to give them funds to continue."The fact that so few users donate money to projects they use is a shameful phenomena.You should change your ways, make a list of the software you use frequently and find out if the people behind them accept donations, then go to their websites and donate!
nightAug 2, 2008
As others have said, blog spam. Go read the original at coddinghorror.com