I’m one of the primary developers on the Bugzilla Project, and we have a donations system. Here’s some things that we have done with the donations:
Fund a contractor to do a survey of the major Bugzilla-using organizations in the world, to find out what we should be doing in the future.
Pay for registration at a convention for one of the developers. (OSCON, which has a particularly pricey registration if you want to attend the sessions.) The Mozilla Foundation covered the travel expenses, our donations covered the registration fee.
I think the problem isn’t what to do with money, the question is what to do with small amounts of money. If I had $100,000, clearly one or two developers could take a year off work and just work on the project. If we made enough in donations to cover even a single person’s work year, that would immensely enhance the project, where currently all developers are volunteers.
Also, I personally have a contracting company, so sometimes the donations can fund my business for developing features that the Project wants. This is handy because my company has more resources available than just me, and it also allows me to keep eating while I’m contributing to the Project.
You could also use it to buy some t-shirts and give them out to the best community members each month, or just give away something to the most active community members (perhaps computer hardware?).
Also, sometimes it’s handy to use the money to buy a new computer for one of the contributors. The Mozilla Corporation helped me buy my machine (even though I don’t work for them), and that really improved my productivity.
You have to get a bit clever with money in an open-source project, because it’s not a traditional type of organization. However, if you have a decently-sized project and also some business experience, it’s possible to think up various items like the ones above that can really help.
Forget about the money. You said no strings. That means no strings. No following-up either. Let it go.
I think that makes +3 to Dave now? It sounds like Dario’s got the situation well in hand: He made something, you liked it, you gave him some money, he put it in the bank, end of story.
I don’t see why you are so eager for him to waste it, as if it was a check from Grandma on his birthday. (Come on, spoil yourself! Buy a third monitor! Have all your friends over for a party! Go on a weeklong vacation to, um, Italy!) He’s running an open-source project, not a shopping spree. Leave him alone.
At the Platypus project (http://platypus.pz.org), we are about to hire someone to review our design and do a full code review. I think this is an excellent way of spending a few shekels, such as part of the sum you provided generously to the wiki project.
And one thing that I didn’t emphasize in the above comment is that you can use money to get time. That is, some developers on the project can’t spend much time on the project because they have a day job or contracting duties. But if they’re being paid, they can spend time on it. I’ve funded some people who normally don’t do much work on Bugzilla to help out with development, and that does make a difference.
Not all open-source projects have so little expending need.
I monitor FirebirdSQL project and, if I have US$5000 to help it,
I would donor it. (Actually, it’s 3 months of salary of mine)
Database systems are a example of very complex software which need
a very rich collection of skills to get go. Let alone document it.
This type of development, where many developers deposit their professional reputation on the result, is always needing of real money.
I believe that exist other software types of open-source software that have enough complexity that the people behind of it could really benefit of some money.
Fascinating question Jeff. I think one of the areas open source needs to develop in is the financial aspect. Specifically, we need to see more open source projects utilize full-time developers. This is really where your money could come handy. Have a fundraising drive to raise x to take x developer on the project full-time. In so doing one escalates the progress of the project dramatically. This isn’t the sort of thing that can simply be done with your donation, but a significant donation such as this could be used to start rolling a fundraising drive for a full-time developer.
I really like the idea of paying a 3-7 days offline hackathon.
Hiring a contractor for an OSS project is uneffective, as it will usually be someone without the flair for the projects, and without knowledge of codebase, and thus the money would not be effectively invested.
I recommend hackathon, because I know how email/irc communication slows down things - you have that awesome idea, but it takes an A4 with an image to explain over mail, and before you write the text, motivation is over. In person, you tell it in 30 seconds with pencil and paper, and immediately see reactions - and youu have just saved half an hour in a minute (I loved doing school projects with my roommate, i felt soo effective).
Making a hackathon is saving time on communication misunderstandings, and I believe that few guys in room could do 1-2 months of after-hours voluntary work in 4 days (and without time/attention tax of multitask-switching).
And simple version of argument is: you give time to people who are most interested in project, and let them have fun while doing it(coding something really fast is fun :)).
You could hire a contractor or two, for the short term at least, to help with coding/design/etc or spend it on advertising to spread the word about the app.
Training, new software, new hardware for developers, a wild Vegas weekend… I can think of lots of stuff, certainly if I had $5k to use, it wouldn’t be sitting untouched.
I think that is just awful. I’m sure there are tons of open source projects that would love to hire a graphic artist to give their website or app a better look. Or to buy a new server to run their site or host their app. I would just make sure that next time you give away money to an open source project, you should ask them if they want it first.
Wow, $5000 - pretty sweet. I think the problem is simply that these folks don’t want to spend it frivolously. Sure they could have a party, but they’d feel bad about it. After all, someone sent them money to work on the project, not have fun with it (did the message from you to do whatever with it actually reach them?).
Maybe a hardware upgrade on their computer to make their compiles faster? How about a computer that they could have a local student(s) use to work on the project? You’ve really touched on an interesting issue here.
The spirit of Open Source Software dictates that money isn’t the most important factor. Money doesn’t bring people to care about a project more, therefore contributing better code. Money doesn’t find talented programmers, willing to work for free because they like it. The whole point of open source software, is that the people writing it like doing it enough to do it for free.
The only thing I can see money doing for an OSS project, is paying for hosting space and paying for advertising to gain interest. Since the hosting is already taken care of, and $5000 isn’t really enough to pay for the advertising, I suggest that they place it into a private account to save for when something DOES need paying for. Maybe they want to buy a server to host in-house? Maybe the lead developer will need a new development machine soon? I suggest that they keep it available until it’s needed, and use it then.
Surely they could purchase some hardware, no? Otherwise, I’d go with lots of peanut butter cups, single-malt scotch, and video games. Just kidding! Well, not really.
Could Dario use the money to further his knowledge which could then be fed back into the project? A coding bootcamp, [insert subject here] training course, etc.?
I agree with the above commenter: if they want to run a contest, run it from the US - I’m sure this blog could play a part in that. Also, if the money is in an Italian bank account, it’s most likely losing money because of Italy’s shitty banks.
I think some projects are more able to use money than others. I also think that amounts of money make a difference. 5k is great, but 60k could pay for a full time developer for a while. In this case, I would say what are the most critical goals? If they want more users, ad money and paying for documentation would be a great use of 5k. If they want plugins, don’t do a contest, just pay someone to make some plugins. If they don’t have enough users to know what a good plugin would be, see my first suggestion.
