I’ve got a little Firefox extension I develop for free under the MIT OS License (Status-bar Calculator) and as much as I’d love to say that $5k would spur further development on it, I’m not sure it actually would.
Probably the only thing it would do would be to convince my wife that the hours and hours I’ve put into it so far were actually worth it. Which I suppose would go towards enabling me to convince her I should spend even more time improving it…
The problem is (I think) that even if a one time donation of $5k drops in your lap, that’s not going to enable you to quit your day job and work on the project. Now, if $40k dropped in your lap, you could probably at that point consider finding a way to quit your job and spend several months focusing specifically on the project and getting it to a place where you could make money on it…
Here in Germany (and I guess everywhere else) students are always short on money and take a job besides their studies. Go to the local university search some promising higher semester cs student and hire him. 300 Euro/month should give you student with 30 hours per month for one year. Even better - instead of one for a year take 4 for 3 month. Give them for the start no critical task, for the introduction let them write some docs/howtos/faws/tutorials or fix some really easy tasks. Later they can do more critical stuff. An if you are lucky afterwards one or two of them are so interrested in the project that they will continue to work (for free) on the project.
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WHILE perhaps disappointing it was not spent, GIVE the guy credit for being so honest and forthright!! He does not want to abuse the gift, or use it in some way that might be criticized.
Giving many people in the world money is not the total answer – many need help in knowing how to spend it wisely.
Time is money! If he is giving his time for free, no doubt he is spending time doing other gainful employment. The money might enable him to afford some unpaid leave to develop or promote the product. Also many more people might use his product if they only knew how or could get some help. A thriving business in consultancy perhaps, the money could help start that up.
You’ve touched on a very interesting point. The few open source projects I’ve worked on were driven by passion more then anything else. Some of them happened to be useful outside my context and I applaud that, but for me, I’d be just as likely to implement a new feature if someone gave me a question which started with, Would it be possible to… as giving me money for a feature. A completely open slate somehow seems daunting - most open source projects are driven from a specific need the original creator has. Anything which can’t be tied back to a need is usually fluff to be ignored on an open source project… and maybe an open pool of money falls into that catagory.
I think an alternate way to give donations would be to organise a phone conversation with the important team members of the project. Make it outlined early that the conversation will likely be about directions for the project, nice to haves and questions about whether anything could be done better (tie everything back to a needs based approach). After that, if it sounds like the team have their interest piqued offer the money in a very non-commital way to see some of those features implemented. If it gets done, great, if not… well I’m sure they’ll enjoy the beer and cigarettes.
I guess it all gets back to chunking… break it down into a few achievable things which would be nice to do and you’d see something done. Giving it and saying do anything with the money somehow seems daunting to someone who’s not used to factoring in money into the equation.
This one’s actually pretty easy. The key weakness of nearly every open source application is its interface and branding, and ScrewTurn appears to be no different. Hire a graphic designer with some experience in usability to make a better icon and streamline the interface. (And don’t, for god’s sake, apply open source methodology to the process.)
Running a bounty requires a good bit of time overhead, not to mention legal involvment. The same goes for hiring outside contractors/artists/etc. I’d bet money that most open source projects don’t have the time or the expertise to do those sorts of things in any reasonable way, nor would they want to spend the time on it, it is rather likely a larger time-sink then the time/benefit to be gained.
Furthermore, running any sort of public bounty opens up the floodgates for people to submit poor-quality code. Normally poor-quality code would be indicated as such and ignored, but with a bounty you now have someone who was expecting to get paid for their time and effort and all-of-a-sudden are not. That’s a recipe for ill-will, on all sides.
Also, as to the repeated comments about hiring people, as was commented before I don’t think $5000 (while a rather large sum of money to be donated in one piece) is likely to be able to buy anything remotely resembling a useful overhaul of the design of an application. That is, of course, unless graphic designers are wildly less well paid than I imagine they are. Or are willing to work at a smaller cost simply because of the project involved (but in that case I’d have hoped they would have offered their services to the project already).
While you may be right, I think it’s a bit early to try to draw any conclusions about money and open source software in general. You’ve donated money one time to a single project. Maybe if you had this experience at least even 4 out of 5 times you could begin to see a pattern.
But otherwise, the only thing you actually seem to have discovered is that Dario Solera has not been able to determine how to use $5,000 to benefit the Screwturn wiki project.