Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

Sometimes it amuses me how badly people misunderstand Free Software development.

What got them there was not money. The incentives for Free Software tend to be either fun, reputation, or (in corporate cases) getting some needed work done. If you want to reward Free Software developers, you give them more of those things.

I bet if you followed up, you’d find that the positive mention on your blog was worth way more than the money to that project.

Exactly. Every opensource project could use:

  1. A good artist, to make the product more appealing
  2. A good web designer, to make web-site of the product look good (hint: check my page, I love its design)
  3. A good SEO to make sure the word about the project is spread well - thus getting even more people to work on it.

As well, they could announce a hacking contest - the one who manages to hack the wiki server gets a hefty sum of money - thus heavily boosting security of their project - which for projects like Wiki are quite important - imagine PR9 Wikipedia linking from each page to enlargement-selling sites.

And they could finally remove that ugly blinking ‘ScrewTurn wiki compatible ASP.NET web hosting’ advertising from their main page at a href=http://www.screwturn.eu/http://www.screwturn.eu//a

And of course - throw a party! Things like this really boost the enthusiasm in open source communities.

Perhaps some kind of bounty system where rewards are set for certain features to encourage more contributions. I’ve not looked at the project itself so I’ve no idea whether or not they have enough contributors involved already or whether the project itself isn’t well suited to this.

They should at least, buy new hardware… It’s wise to take some time to think but, 4 months? Come on

I don’t think that’s the worst possible result: you’ve given the money to someone who’s apparently pretty conscientious. If it sits, it sits. That falls under whatever they saw fit. My suggestion would be to spend the money on a vacation to re-charge. That or use it to get all the people on the project together in one place for beers, assuming there’s more than one person and they’re geographically distant.

I understand Italy’s laws are too oppressive to hold a contest, but bounty-hunting shouldn’t be such a problem. or how about improving that ugly site they have? perhaps turning into something that showcases many examples of beautiful themes used by different websites that use ScrewTurn for their wikis…they could hire a graphic artist for 5k that’ll make for them the site of their dreams.

One more thing Jeff. Your ‘no HTML’ feature is bad, face it.
It wasn’t me who screwed the link to screwturn website - it was screwed by your blogging software when it replaced the url with html and then refused to post it because I have mentioned v-i-a-g-r-a on the page.

Just a friendly bug report. Don’t be offended - I still think you are a good, um, web developer.

Zombie defense.

With all the zombie movies that came out of Italy it must be a real threat.

When confronted by a gift of money intended for an open source projects benefit, as the maintainer, there can be a huge element of guilt involved when dipping into the money, a mental tax of sorts.

To some projects, a gift of $5000 would be more of a burden than a help.

Dario, spend it to attend to PDC in Los Angeles!!!

Attending is half of what you have, the other half can cover the plane ticket and some lodging.

This way it’s something in the middle between a vacation and something useful!

Ciao
Massimo

Take part of it, design some cool polo shirts/t-shirts. Then offer them up freely to code contributors… as a marketing technique to recruit code contributors, not necessarily users.

Unfortunately, the shipping costs for something like that outweigh the costs of the shirts themselves… so you end up giving your money out to Fedex.

The donation should be split between all the developers, to be treated as plain income. It’s like a bonus for a job well done. They can use it to buy new toys, or pay rent.

Since many of these open source projects depend on hosting companies and other supporting infrastructure, why not donate the money to an organization that specifically supports open source projects. In that way, you are suppporting numerous OS projects by buying a server that hosts numerous groups.

Maybe it would be worth buying something practical - for instance, the Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever (http://www.noop.nl/2008/06/top-100-best-software-engineering-books-ever.html). The coders may already have some/many of them, but there’s bound to be something new to pick up…!

An Open Source project can progress in two ways: Either there are many many users, a small % of them apply modifications, and a % of that % actually submit their changes, OR developers are actually PAID by a higher corporation to work on that open project (e.g. Novell).

That 5000$ should have been spent on developers, the rest is always cheap enough to survive. +1 for a PDC trip for Dario!

Hiring a Graphic Design would be my way to go.

Wasted your money on YET ANOTHER FUCKING WIKI. As if there wasn’t enough of those fucking things floating around.

Even if they had used it would it have made a difference? Nah we’d just have a slightly better YET ANOTHER WIKI

Giving money to a Microsoft Technology Open Source Project is like giving a barbecue and veal steaks to a religious Indian family so they eat it in their Sunday gettogether where they pray to Allah and play Nintendo Wii: just a plain ridiculous mixup of shit altogether.

Plain and simple: if you love open source, you use open source tools, not .NET, because using .NET is widening M$'s niche and giving them more developers. The more developers you have who know how to work M$ technology, the more M$ technology projects you have, and the less you support real Open Source industry.

So, basically, what I’m saying is: serves you right

I second the notion that they should use it for graphic design. Software developers can write fantastic software all they want, but there is no substitute to a very good graphic design and branding.

Perhaps they could hire the guy that did the branding for Firefox, John Hicks: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

What about buying hardware? I know hardware is much cheaper than it used to be and devs probably have enough hardware already, but it could be the best investment (and the easiest to make).