There are open source projects that ask for money or which are in badly need of money.
Please consider diverting your money to such projects. I know this is lame but it very logical. IF you plan to do good for a project you love, then mail the project leader about his plans and if he needs money for any of his plans. If he doesn’t have any, or the project is going well, or he doesn’t have any interest in using such huge money, then I clearly consider it meaningless to send money.
However, you can donate money to projects that DO NEED it. Or may be fsf who can divert it to free projects.
Emotional attachment to the project you love is not bad, but just dumping huge money and hoping it will improve is clearly not logical.
I hope your article does not discourage people from donating, the only lesson to be learned is not that it is useless… but ask what the project requires before helping them…
I usually don’t comment but I couldn’t resist this time.
I would just split this money between the project members and let than do with it whatever they want to. Everybody has gas, electricity bills to pay. It would be a bit of relief not to have to pay these for month or so.
Maybe this project is so successful, exactly because they managed to have no costs (they had to anyway) and because of that there is nothing the team could do with this money. The project simply goes without any money…
… taking a brake from paying personal bills might be a nice motivation to work harder on no-money-required-open-source-project too.
Greets
Mariusz
ps. StackOverflow is getting better without Joel interrupting you everytime now. I’ve listened to each cast so far and I like it…
And one more thing.
I remember you writing about a pain of remembering passwords to thousands different websites. Got this same problem. I decided to write small app remembering this stuff for you. It uses a master-password and DES algorithm to crypt them all. I write this app mostly for myself trying to make my web accounts more safe than they are right now. Maybe you will be interested in it as well.
If you want I’ll let you know when finish…
Interesting stuff. I suppose it just goes to show that money isn’t actually necessary to make software… its just what we end up paying developers with because they need it to live.
Even I’m not naive enough to suggest that money can solve every open source software problem. But I don’t have a lot of time to contribute; I only have advertising revenue. I’m absolutely dumbfounded to learn that contributing money isn’t an effective way to advance an open source project. Surely money can’t be totally useless to open source projects… can it?
Of course it isn’t totally useless. But think about it. In a project with no particular capital requirements (only labour), $5000 doesn’t buy a lot of time. Maybe it would buy 2-3 man-weeks of development, but who wants to do that? If you’d donated, say, $50,000 (enough to hire someone full-time for 6 months), then sure, I would expect some result from it.
Oh, and this open source projects need time, not money thing is a load of nonsense. Money is readily converted into time. That’s what you’re doing whenever you pay someone to do some development work. So seriously, don’t give us that crap.
well, very nice of you sending a $5k,
but i just want to state that not all projects are like this one, i mean there are projects that starve for money or even stop because of lack of it.
I would agree with the fact that OSS projects feed on time, not money, but again I repeat not all projects!
some developers really like developing for free, but they have insufficient income that doesn’t leave them any time to contribute to the OSS community, if they were funded a way or another they will happily contribute their time and effort.
I would suggest they make a hack camp for a couple of days or so, and let computer science students contribute modules and themes and fix bugs or whatever, give them some mugs and t-shirts with the logo printed on it.
or else i support the suggestion of giving away the money to any other project that really needs money
Offer compensation to programmers. Pick a few key guys, and have them commit to working on the project full time for $N,000 where N is the number of weeks they are committing to the project.
I know I’d spend more time (and probably more valuable time (rather than the 10:00PM to 2:00AM time slot that OSS usually gets from me) if I was able to take an unpaid vacation from my day job, take the $1K compensation for the week and put a large amount of work into the project, I’m pretty sure that would help.
This is an older post and has a ton of comments, so hopefully someone didn’t already mention this. What about using the money at somewhere like http://crowdspring.com (are there other sites like it?) or elance to get some themes or other design work done?
There is guilt involved in dipping into the one and only pot of money like that. I’d suggest you make some suggestions. If you want a suggestion from me, I’d say: attend a conference they wouldn’t normally attend but may learn a lot at. Including pre-conference tutorials if they exist. For this particular project, an advanced programming language theory conference would fit the bill: something like POPL or ICFP or PLDI. They might learn some techniques they could really use, and they might get hooks into some communities they might not otherwise encounter.
This is why ScrewTurn Wiki is just some also-ran and not being universally used and embraced. This is why you don’t hear ScrewTurn as the Wiki .Net developers turn to.
This guy has $5k in the bank and doesn’t know what to do with it?
He should have like 50 things to do with it! Here’s a baker’s dozen.
Take a month off work and bring in a salary while you expand the program.
Hire a designer to build better layouts.
Fire up a UserVoice account and start taking suggestions for improvement. Then hire a student to make these improvements. (use this to supplement the roadmap, http://www.screwturn.eu/Roadmap.ashx)
Get people installing the software by buying advertising. Buy on .Net products like Podcasts (Hanselminutes, DNR) and blogs (here, hanselman, haacked, …), sponsor a .NET user group or two.
Hire a mechanical turk to ensure that your wiki appears on every searchable wiki list on the net. See if you can’t buy sponsored places.
Attempt to build a hosted version like WetPaint.
Hire people to do instructional videos on how-to use wikis.
Hire technical writers to improve the documentation.
Start a targeted e-mail campaign to get local businesses using the wiki (see above hosted option).
Create a hosted version in tandem with an advertising campaign and start charging businesses for monthly use. Spend some money on someone to build videos for you.
Run a contest for the best plug-in.
Attend a US conference and plug your project.
Honestly, this looks like a solid wiki that’s been consistently maintained (look at the history). But outside of Jeff’s blog, I’ve never heard of it. He has a powerful product running what looks like a $10 website, he’s trapped in a developer universe. This isn’t about him any more, he has money in the bank to do all of the things he’s no good at. Unless he admits this, the project is just going to fade into the annals of time as somebody with less talent and more marketing savvy simply makes a better product.
One thing I might do with that cash on an open-source project is take care of infrastructure. For instance, digital signatures/Authenticode, maybe a nice installation framework such as InstallShield. I know I frequently wish I had an InstallShield license, even at my proper job.
$5000 in my experience is not enough to hire someone to do anything really significant software-wise. what i think would be the most productive use of this money would be to use it for travel grants to get some of the key developers together.
The ones that have already made it dont need money. The ones that are promising and still struggling needs your money - they dont have ads and cant cover the server cost.
