I’m not sure about the open source .NET project but I surely know how would i invest that kind of money and even more in creating a Non-Profit Organization specialized on quality open source game development (cross-platform).
IMHO improving the gaming experience on open source operating system will highly attract more users to the open source desktop side and indirectly scale development, as well as market share of Linux and related projects…
Anyway, I’m already working on this for quite some time, but getting the necessary funds required for a great start will take me a few months of work
If anyone interested in this, feel free to ask questions: dk.vali@gmail.com
P.S.: Any kind of help will be likely very appreciated.
First, the fact that they didn’t spend money doesn’t indicate anything wrong. It just indicates they want to use the money efficiently for the project instead of wasting it. I could see 3 potential uses of the money, 1 1 good, 1 OK and one outright bad.
Outright BAD :
*giving to developpers or contractors
It will create ill-will among unpaid (or less paid) developpers
OK :
hiring someone for quality insurance or graphical design
It may improve the software in one of the areas where finding volunteers seems the hardest
Good :
hiring some corporate seller, who will try to sell the software to users, by organising demos and targeted advertising. This will make the project more widely use, hence more popular, and it may also bring a certain number of new developpers
How would I spend it if I were a young project looking for more talent? Go to some conferences and see if I can drum up interest by presenting. It’s a good way of getting more talent onto your team, and possibly even more people interested in using your software.
Well done Jeff for giving them the money. You could always console yourself that it’s the thought that counts? I bet it boosted their morale to receive the money… In that spirit I will get busy clicking your ads
I think they used the money well by not spending it right away. It is emergency money that will become useful at an unexpected time. By spending it needlessly now, that would be wasting its true purpose.
Also, you mentioned it was a no strings attached donation, so it’s probably better if you forget about it (and perhaps not even follow up on it). By following up with the recipient of the donation, it implies that there’s a still a string attached. I would think of it as a payment or one-time salary to the project creator that he has earned through hard work.
I think your main problem is that $5000 is both too much and not enough. It’s enough to be a burden, not enough to actually employ someone for much time. And it’s a particularly awkward amount to bestow on someone without their having a way to use it.
And of course money means different things depending on what your specific work is. I have a friend who recently got wooed to a brand new university with an offer than all faculty got some arbitrary sum, say $20,000, as a personal research budget. Scientists thought this was a paltry sum – not nearly enough to do a lot of good with – but my friend is an historian, and so he has way more money than he knows what to do with (trips to archives only cost so much).
I think the problem here is that your generosity led you to a throw money at it sort of solution. Spending doesn’t get results. Spending intelligently gets results.
Maybe they can spend the money on education. Like booking a customized workshop from a well-known and honored training company (including hotel and supply)?
Poor Dario, who out of the blue receives some money for his project, and because he doesn’t have a good idea of how to spend it, waits. Yeah, what a jerk.
The money may have come with no strings attached, but imagine the backlash had Dario spent the money frivolously and Jeff reported back here. In fact, no matter how he spent it there’d be some know-it-all complaining bitterly. DDOS Witchhunt or what? Lets fry the bastard.
It has nothing to do with laudable goals such as ‘open source programmers don’t need money’ Everyone needs money, and your company probably doesn’t spend money haphazardly either.
If Dario has nothing to spend it on, then prudently, he shouldn’t spend it. Thanks go to some of you with good ideas.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Read a book on constructive criticism on day. Shame on you. Didn’t your momma ever tell you that if you’ve got nothing good to say, shut up?
Can I suggest a professional debugger/patcher team? Mostly, open source project don’t have some people that collect bug reports, priritize them, and do a patching. Open Source is based primarily on volunteers, so it would be nice if someone is payed for full time patching. Mozilla foundation pays for its developers, so… why not?
Don’t pay for coding, especially not by setting up a regular program to pay bounties or whatever. You’ve already got coders, and you risk a negative effect on the culture of the effort by introducing payment to coders.
One suggestion I haven’t seen (at least after plowing through about the first 1/5 of comments) is organising a get-together for the developers. $5,000 could pay for a small venue and a dinner or two in a mutually-agreed city, developers can pay their own way out. Some face to face time can have a really positive impact.
Failing that, I agree with spending it on some specialist (non-coding!) effort that you can’t easily get contributed, such as usability, design, or documentation. Just make sure it’s done in a way that can be maintained going forward, a pretty package of docs or whatever will start decaying the minute the next code commit comes in.
how about open-source games like UFO Alien Invasion, TORCS and many more? some say open source doesn’t work for games. perhaps, because of high quality art/content that is expensive. an open-source game project could benefit from a donation by buying royality free 3d models, textures, sounds, or paying professionals for creating them and then releasing them under some Creative Commons lincense…
Use the money to pay for a week not working on the project. Pay for some food and drink for the office for two weeks, get the devlopers to come in and work on whatever they want, in whatever field and however they want to do it.
Promote looking at new technologies, but try getting some form of deliverable from all developers at the end of the two weeks, a presentation on how things went for them, how they liked the technology, or even better, a working application.
Then have a night out.
This will help open up the imagination again and will allow your developers to come back to the project, fresh with new ideas, and an improved view of their peers.
I like the idea of having a rainy day fund - ready access to cash can really make a difference when important hardware goes bang, or some other minor catastrophy occurs.
Not sure if anyone has suggested this, but if the money has to be spent why not use the money to donate usable internet access, hosting and a copy of ScrewTrun Wiki to Charities and not for profit organisations? I have included useful internet access here as many charities just can’t afford access, so having a nice shiney new website would be close to useless for them as they woudln’t be able to update the information.
Depending on where everyone involved is, it might be worthwhile to get a retreat/meetup for the dev team. I run a one-man project[0] that is mostly dependent on another one[1], and last year I was sponsored by a commercial integrator[2] of both projects to visit LinuxWorld with them - getting some facetime for a week was the most valuable part of the whole thing. Things go faster and smoother when you are all in the same room. Depends on the project and the geography of course - $5K doesn’t cover too much travel.
Other than that, my project is mostly self-sustaining - I’ve used ad revenue to pay for some design work, and some hosting. As Jeff says, time is the big issue, especially time when you actually feel motivated to work in the evenings/weekends.
I think offering up a bounty for a feature - or perhaps paying a software-testing house to do usability metrics or something for your 2.5K could be money really well spent.
Money is the reason people do shit jobs, so that’s what the money should be used for IMHO. Testing, Documentation, Marketing.
