Two words: MONO PROJECT
Awesome open source .NET Project!!
+1 to Justinâs comment above. Itâs not that $5000 wouldnât help an open source project, itâs just that itâs not enough.
Itâs not enough because as someone above already pointed out, OS projects are fueled on time, not money. If you can give a developer enough money that they donât have to spend eight hours a day at a gig to keep the lights on, theyâd gladly focus on their OS project, which is likely where there passion and intellectual stimulation is really coming from. If it wasnât they wouldnât already be working on it on their free time.
So, if ten companies donated $5000, then youâd end up with one developer doing nothing else but becoming an expert in their OS technology. You need more drops in the bucket to make that work.
How about some of the above (hardware, designwork, usability testing) plusâŚ
Books
Productivity tools (if worth it over the free stuff)
Just a sidenote: I know spelling it M$ doesnât add up to my credibility. It was probably a poor choice of ⌠wording? Actually sorry about that.
And I know what Open Source means. As I said, the problem with it being a .NET project is that, for example, no fixes to the development tools can be made, and thus they donât give any feedback to the open source community. Thatâs why you should use open source tools for open source projects. Just a matter of principle.
I understand that there are a lot of OS .NET projects, and I understand that sometimes you donât get to choose the platform youâre working on, but as for me, I canât see myself donating to them, first of all because they chose a non-multi-platform medium to work on.
He was not joking: fiscal laws here in Italy are pointlessly intricated and discretional, from entrepreneurs down to single person receiving donations.
This is, blatantly, in order to prevent any honest and clever worker to set up any real businnes in favour of businnes run by entrepreneurs protected by politics (right, left and center ones) or crime (which pays its bribes to politics).
And if they canât enter the businness, it will also be easy to hire them as underpaid workers.
It is sad, but it is true, and it is why many IT-related companies, even big, have had hard times to enter Italian market in later decades, with any of latest governaments.
Iâve run an open source project (Axiom) for years and the question of
funding comes up occasionally. I believe that the primary use for
money would be to fund meetings. When I do corporate work I have my
travel, hotel, and meals covered in order to attend face-to-face
meetings. What open source lacks is the corporate accounting machinery.
What open source needs is a grant holding agency where NSF or other
people could donate money. Then I, as the Axiom project, can ask for
grant money to cover travel, hotel, and meals for a meeting. All
receipts would be sent to the open source accounting organization
to be paid out of the grants.
No individual project, such as Axiom, has the time, the expertise,
or corporate clothing to handle such grant administration. But a
central open source grant (OSG) organization could deal with large
corporations or government or private grants and handle things like
taxes, accounting, etc.
Unfortunately I do not have the expertise to set up such an
organization.
Thank you very much for sharing us!
You have made a great post and very helpful Especially to me!
Thank you very much 
this post is really helpfulâŚ
however, 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.
Itâs not enough because as someone above already pointed out, OS projects are fueled on time, not money. If you can give a developer enough money that they donât have to spend eight hours a day at a gig to keep the lights on, theyâd gladly focus on their OS project, which is likely where there passion and intellectual stimulation is really coming from. If it wasnât they wouldnât already be working on it on their free time.
http://goldprotect.ru
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.
http://goldprotect.ru
Wow ! $5000!! Pretty high donation.
every project needs money.the cost is there.
Wow ! $5000!! Pretty high donation.
If I received such a grant to my own open source project I would probably use it for things that us developers tend to let fall by the wayside- like hiring a professional graphic designer or UI expert to spruce up the looks. I find many OSS projects suffer from great functionality but atrocious design.
But itâs so true that time is really the main thing we need. $5000 is great⌠but does it allow someone to quit/cut back on their day job?
Maybe using it to pay an intern to do testing or fix bugs for a couple months would be a good use?
Use it to sponsor a summer internship for a talented CS student to work on the project. Might need to raise a couple thousand more to cover a summerâs expenses, but students live cheap, and it would benefit both the project and the studentâs CV.
The Django project recently got its own software foundation which accepts donations: http://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/
One of the main ways the money will be spent is flights and hotels for key project contributors to attend Django sprints and conferences. Weâve found that in-person development sprints are massively productive and hence a great thing to spend money on.
Agree on hiring a professional web designer / graphic artist. Their site is pretty ghetto, and considering that the whole point of a Wiki is (more or less) to abstract away the design work, it would definitely help them to have something slicker like MediaWiki does.
Even in the commercial world, visual appeal is a huge part of what sells a product. Maybe the FOSSies arenât trying to make a profit, but they do want to see widespread acceptance of the fruits of their labour, and that takes more than just a big FREE sign. You need some level of marketing and pizazz.
The technical writer / documentation suggestion is good too, but I think that spiffying up their site and PR would increase their ad and donation revenue, which they could then use to do all those other nice things anyway.
$5000, whilst a generous donation, wouldnât pay a contractor long enough to make a difference to the project
Thatâs exactly why paying for transport (flights and hotels) is a better fit for an open source project - people are already donating their time, but the travel costs often make the difference between going to an event and staying at home.
There are too many comments to read, so Iâm not sure if this has been suggested. If I received $5,000 for my open source project, that would cover two to four weeks of my jobâs salary. I would try and negotiate some unpaid time off from work and dedicate myself full time to my project. I would make the same offer to other members of the project.
Perhaps you have stumbled onto something even more profound than the value of money to an open source project. Perhaps the value of money in general is not what people make it out to be.
I recently took a job (2 years ago) paying HALF what my previous one did, but in exchange, I get time with my family. I make it home for dinner on time almost every night, and most weekends off.
Time is not money. Time is finite. You can always get more money or spend less. I hope they find a useful way to spend it, but in the end, it is just money, and it really does not matter that much. Unfortunately, the things that really matter are not things you can give them as a gift.