Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

I would recommend a party. Get everyone who you can that is dispersed into one location, and have a massive blowout. Provided someone doesn’t puke in the punch bowl it might help strengthen the already existing community.

Just a fun thought.

I am sure some of the people on the project are using trial, demo, cutdown or god forbid dodgy software.

How about pick the (pick a number) highest contributors and buy them whatever dev software they want.

Jeff
There are a heap of good sugestions here.

Cause I am lazy :slight_smile: Can you do a followup post with the best ones?

give money to all contributors
eg $10 per bug found (patch must be submitted)

@Gary Schubert: use Opera and then turn off GIF aimation.

Buy new hardware to support the development effort?

Do not have to buy like right_now but when the time to get faster components come.

I’m sure others have already mentioned this (too many comments to read through right now), but one thing I have always found lacking in most OS projects is documentation. I’m not familiar with the one you donated to, but if its like all the others out there, I think hiring a professional documentation writer could triple the adoption of most OS projects out there.

And not just end user docs either, but also developer howto’s on plug-in development, module development or whatever other forms of contributions that can be made to the code base.

@Tim: The organization already exists. It is called Software in the Public Interest.

Even if it is open source and you are working without money, there are some costs involved. If you want to go for working full time for developing some kind of software then you need money to sustain yourself.

Just think how will you pay for your electricity, food, internet, computer hardware etc.?

I remember my days when i was working a day job and working for http://www.shopfordesigns.com at night. At first I thought that I would be throwing a project at rentacoder as Jrme Radix said in the very first comment but then i thought of using PHP / MySQL and develop things myself. I was not a designer and the toil was tough to get a designer. Again money was involved.

The true meaning of open source is that the code should be open for everybody to see and improvise upon but it does not mean that developers will work for FREE to develop it.

As an open source developer who’s project has just taken off this year, I can see how $5000 could be used in an open source project effectively depending on the developers. For example, I’m still a student at university (as companies don’t want to hire you without that piece of paper), and I have a young family to support. Thankfully here is Aus, the government pays us to study, so I can put food on the table and pay our rent, but there are no luxuries for us.
My project is a hotspot project, and recently I have been getting some small donations. These have helped purchase some more hardware for testing. Had I gotten $5000 in donations, it would allow me to spend a lot more time on the project, purchase hardware that is having problems that I don’t have (i.e. iPhone/iPad are giving us trouble but until recently I didn’t have any of that hardware to test). I’d even look at getting some professional graphic design work down, and usability testing as these are things that are lacking.

Given that some developers are funded by large companies, they have much less need for money to continue developing. Others who are in a very small team, might not have full time work, having the ability to say here is $5000, now spend the next 5 weeks working on the project, might just be what is needed. I certainly feel inspired to add features from the feature request list when I get a donation, rather than just doing bug fixes!

ScrewturnWiki can use this money to advertise their product to just make people more aware of what ScrewturnWiki is. Advertisement- no limit, $5k or if $50k, will be spent in just seconds.