programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
In April I donated $5,000 of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project. It was exciting to be able to inject some of the energy from this blog into the often-neglected .NET open source ecosystem.
As I mentioned at the time, I used a very hands off approach. While I did have some up-front criteria for the award (open source license, public source control, accepts outside source contributions) it's basically a no-strings grant.
The real money is being sent via wire transfer to Dario Solera, the ScrewTurn Wiki project coordinator. What's Dario going to do with this money? You'll have to ask him. That's not for me to decide. There are no strings attached to this money of any kind. I trust the judgment of a fellow programmer to run their project as they see fit.
When I said the project could do whatever they saw fit with the money, I meant it. Buy liquor and cigarettes, throw a huge party, play it on the ponies. I'm not kidding. As long as the project team believes it's a valid way to move their project forward, whatever they say goes. It's their project, and their grant.
I hadn't heard anything from Dario, and I was curious, so I followed up with him via email. He sent back this response:
The grant money is still untouched. It's not easy to use it. Website hosting fees are fully covered by ads and donations, and there are no other direct expenses to cover. I thought it would be cool to launch a small contest with prizes for the best plugins and/or themes, but that is not easy because of some laws we have here in Italy that render the handling of a contest quite complex.What would you suggest?
I was crushingly disappointed to find out the $5,000 in grant money has been sitting in the bank for the last four months, totally unused. That's painful to hear, possibly the most painful of all outcomes. Why did we bother doing this if nothing changes?
My friend Jon Galloway warned me this might happen. I didn't believe him. But what other conclusion can I draw at this point? He was right:
Open Source is to Traditional Software as Terror Cells are to Large Standing Armies – if you gave a terrorist group a fighter jet, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Open source teams, and culture, have been developed such that they're almost money-agnostic. Open source projects run on time, not money. So, the way to convert that currency is through bounties and funded internships. Unfortunately, setting those up takes time, and since that's the element that's in short supply, we're back to square one.
I had hoped that $5,000 grant money would be converted into something that furthered an open source project -- perhaps something involving the community and garnering more code contributions. But apparently that's more difficult than anyone realized.
Jon offered these ideas:
I must admit I'm at a bit of a loss here. Do you have any ideas for how the Screwturn Wiki project can use their $5,000 open source grant effectively? If so, please share them in the comments here, or on the ScrewTurn forum -- in the Suggestions and Feature Requests area.
Even I'm not naive enough to suggest that money can solve every open source software problem. But I don't have a lot of time to contribute; I only have advertising revenue. I'm absolutely dumbfounded to learn that contributing money isn't an effective way to advance an open source project. Surely money can't be totally useless to open source projects... can it?
I'm suprised people complain about the administration overhead of a project that already has time donated? What is more free than free?
While I agree this is unlikely to get read...
Do things that will invigorate the project that never seem to get done otherwise
a) Graphic designer... a more attractive site / product / packaging will help the number of people using your product. 50-100 hours of graphic design... sweet. Doesn't seem like much - well host a user contest (win bragging rights) for ideas to serve as creative input into the process
b) Test Harness / Regression Framework... not sure if you have one or how it fits with your product but anything that allows you to make future development/testing more efficient is a good idea.
c) Blitz and party? Help offset the cost of plane tickets to someone's house for X number of core programmers... It's cheap to camp at someone's house, spent X days in programming blitz / X days in bug blast / and a day left to party... then everyone goes home tired but energized about the project because of the tonne of work that just got done.
Craig on July 30, 2008 7:38 AMOne more +1 for Dave (up to +4 now?) but I'd go a step further:
You set them up for failure.
Here's why. By going back on your promise of no strings and publicly airing your crushing disappointment with their (non-)use of the money thus far, you have created thousands of potential users of ScrewTurn Wiki who think that they are screw-ups. Or, at the very least, anyone reading your post who had never heard of ScrewTurn Wiki (I hadn't) will first wonder whether they ever got around to spending your money. I wouldn't ever have known that they hadn't spent the money if you hadn't posted on it.
You've attached powerful strings to your money with this huge guilt trip, even if you maintain that they still can spend the money however they want. Is that what you intended?
mbhunter on July 30, 2008 7:38 AMOne big problem is that often money alone does not change much.
I think we need to put the human factor more into account.
- Human brain
- Motivation
- Knowledge
- Coding powers
I think money alone won't necessarily change many of the above things.
Personally I think the biggest factor is motivation, then comes knowledge. Both things take time.
But I guess one thing what money could improve is forming and shaping small communities of programmers THAT CAN WORK together, AND to help big and good projects like KDE grow more, because they will stimulate more and more growth.
It is like a hotspot for future growth.
markus on July 30, 2008 8:51 AMI see a lot of responses along the lines of hiring artists or other designer/arty types. The thing is, $5000 is only going to buy you a small, finite amount of work for what is supposedly an ever-evoloving program.
If there's a need for good artistic or visual design work on a project, the Right Thing to do would be to hook up the devs with artists who might want to contribute their work for the same reasons the coders are contributing theirs. The incentives might even be higher for them than for coders. For an artist or designer looking for work, it would be awesome to be able to point to a project online already using their work.
Again, we are in a realm where money doesn't help a lot.
T.E.D. on July 30, 2008 10:08 AMJeff,
five grand are sitting in the account because five grand are not enough - not enough to attract a larger team, start a larger marketing effort for the platform and not enough to have a deadline by which a project should be *done* done.
Open source projects are driven by enthusiasts. Their motivation is not money. However, a possibility to use their labor of love to jumpstart a commercial product would require money - far more than five grand.
Think Linus Torvalds. He would not be a millionaire today had Linux not become a commercial product (Red Hat gave Linus a tons of shares as a thank you) and had it not found a wide acceptance in other commercial products. Money alone cannot spread the word, but marketing supported with money certainly helps. Coding and development of open source projects will not be helped with money.
How about you ask for that money back and spread the word about their platform instead (another blog?)
Hey, this is Jeff. About that five grand... since it is not working for ya, I want it back...
You donated the money for any purpose on that project. Since money has no purpose there, money back seems in order.
BugFree on July 30, 2008 10:19 AMYou know, you should not re-invent the wheel. There are at least 3 very well establish models for giving money, the reason for and the goal for giving the money may be different, so the system most fit the goal and spirit. but it seems to me you went way to liberal with your no system, hurting both the goal the spirit and from a philosophical point of view, you did not went the utilitarian way...
My guess is that the best model you should have followed is the one used by researchers that try to get grants to fund their research. If some organization wants to give 100K to support cancer research, he wants to give it to whomever will use it best (highest ROI, where the goal is advancing cancer research). You should have had people apply by saying why the money will be put to best use, and choose based on that. The money should go to whoever *knows* how to make the best use of.
Dali on July 30, 2008 10:20 AMAlso, think how it took 400 million USD (Apple's acquisition of NEXT) to convince Steve Jobs to work for $1/year at Apple.
Open source rocks, man. Especially when it is greased with millions (people, dollars,....)
BugFree on July 30, 2008 10:21 AMWell, that was food for thought !!
By the way why does not the word orange never change??
That it had to be a .Net project was a pretty big string. There are some OSS projects that rely on donations to hire employees to do the kind of work that's too hard or boring (or big) for the volunteer devs to manage.
5,000 was 10% of NetBSD's most recent fund drive for instance.
It's entirely possible that there just aren't that many .Net projects that have sections so hard, boring, or big, that they have to pay someone to work on it. That was essentially your only real restriction on the money, maybe it's time you relaxed it.
HitScan on July 30, 2008 11:11 AMIt's my impression FOSS projects really hurt for good:
1. graphic design (icons, t-shirts, stickers)
2. marketing PR
3. documentation
4. UI design
5. Associated web design (the ScrewTurn site kinda...sucks?)
So there's 5 places ScrewTurn Wiki could've used that money.
Except for #1 these things are kind of unfun, uncool and labor-intensive. Most people don't want to spend their free hours (or employer's 20%) drafting press releases. To get good results in these fields, you usually need to PAY someone to do it. They have no add-on network effect, either: if I open-source my icon, what happens is everyone uses my icon and that kind of defeats the point of having a DISTINCTIVE icon.
That said, didn't you offer this without strings? Why do you care what they don't spend their money on? I say chalk this up to experience and promise yourself to attach some strings to your next grant.
Paul Souders on July 30, 2008 11:28 AMDario, please do not spend that money on a party or holiday.
At a stroke, it would make an industry that is not really known for discipline and professionalism look even more slack. It would also make other open source projects struggle that much more to raise money. The publicity from a no strings donation being spent that way could be catastrophic ... whether that criticism is justified or not.
And Jeff, cut the man some slack! I know this is a tech blog, but I think the world would be in a much better shape if more people had Dario's attitude, and didn't seek something to spend as soon as money was plonked in their account. Sure, they might not need it now. This attitude toward money will pull them through leaner times.
gsinau on July 30, 2008 12:10 PMBuy the best software development tools. Examples: profiler, post-compile optimizer, load-tester, automated testing tools.
That's assuming you already like your editor and compiler.
Jason on July 31, 2008 2:28 AMThank you Jeff, this was the most insightful post in the last months :)
For my personal project p300 (http://p300.eu/) I'd throw a party and save the money for working on it for a while after university.
guruz on July 31, 2008 3:47 AMThey can put the money to better use by donating it to any project that doesn't use .NET.
WurdBendur on July 31, 2008 4:29 AMAs the project maintainer for Miranda IM, I have to agree with your assertion that OSS projects run primarily on time, rather than money, although I also believe that there is a balancing point on which each of these sit, one that meanders somewhat over the course of the projects lifetime. For Miranda, contributions open doors and give us options to better serve our community.
Self-sufficiency and independence is something that developers in general, and the OSS community at large hold in high regard, and perhaps it is this view and determination that results in project leaders not knowing what to do with generous contributions such as yours. Not because it's not needed, but rather they haven't had the luxury of time to think about it.
Keep up the support, it's appreciated.
Regards,
Koobs
Project Maintainer
Miranda IM
Why doesn't Dario just pay himself for the time he's put into his project? (And other developers).
Alternatively, put the money in a sort of trust account for any future expenses or to maintain the site in case other revenue goes away.
fool on July 31, 2008 8:35 AMI'd suggest you take back your money first, before deciding plan B. You may not even be able to have your money back, as was demonstrated in Hong Kong Linux User Group during the disband of all exco (I'm not one of them, but familiar enough with the situation). You know, as people are so busy, they may not even have the time to return you the money.
Afterwards, you can use it on anything you see fit. If you really want to donate to open source projects, I'd suggest you donating to some _real_ foundations like Apache or Mozilla, which most certainly makes better use of your money (no matter on PR campaign, on paying staff, on hiring people, or whatever). Anything else is better than keeping the money in bank (sans throwing them out of window). Somehow I remembered a quote from bible...
Hong Kong Guy on July 31, 2008 11:14 AMYou've admitted to doing a little bit of vanity searching but just in case this one slips through, you've made it to WIRED magazine's webmonkey section...
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/What_Do_Small_Open_Source_Projects_Do_With_Money__Not_MuchDOT
Sean Patterson on July 31, 2008 12:42 PMContrariwise, I suspect Dario Solera sent $5000 to Jeff Atwood for this peace of viral marketing. ;-)
hmmm on July 31, 2008 1:25 PMThere are open source projects that _ask_ for money or which are in badly need of money.
Please consider diverting your money to such projects. I know this is lame but it very logical. IF you plan to do good for a project you love, then mail the project leader about his plans and if he needs money for any of his plans. If he doesn't have any, or the project is going well, or he doesn't have any interest in using such huge money, then I clearly consider it meaningless to send money.
However, you can donate money to projects that DO NEED it. Or may be fsf who can divert it to free projects.
Emotional attachment to the project you love is not bad, but just dumping huge money and hoping it will improve is clearly not logical.
I hope your article does not discourage people from donating, the only lesson to be learned is not that it is useless... but ask what the project requires before helping them...
evilsense on July 31, 2008 1:36 PMolder??...ok future guy.
This post sure is a hot topic nowadays...
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2008-08-01-026-35-OP-OO
Hi Jeff,
I usually don't comment but I couldn't resist this time.
I would just split this money between the project members and let than do with it whatever they want to. Everybody has gas, electricity bills to pay. It would be a bit of relief not to have to pay these for month or so.
Maybe this project is so successful, exactly because they managed to have no costs (they had to anyway) and because of that there is nothing the team could do with this money. The project simply goes without any money...
... taking a brake from paying personal bills might be a nice motivation to work harder on no-money-required-open-source-project too.
Greets
Mariusz
ps. StackOverflow is getting better without Joel interrupting you everytime now. I've listened to each cast so far and I like it...
And one more thing.
I remember you writing about a pain of remembering passwords to thousands different websites. Got this same problem. I decided to write small app remembering this stuff for you. It uses a master-password and DES algorithm to crypt them all. I write this app mostly for myself trying to make my web accounts more safe than they are right now. Maybe you will be interested in it as well.
If you want I'll let you know when finish...:-)
Interesting stuff. I suppose it just goes to show that money isn't actually necessary to make software... its just what we end up paying developers with because they need it to live.
jheriko on August 1, 2008 7:00 AMEven I'm not naive enough to suggest that money can solve every open source software problem. But I don't have a lot of time to contribute; I only have advertising revenue. I'm absolutely dumbfounded to learn that contributing money isn't an effective way to advance an open source project. Surely money can't be totally useless to open source projects... can it?
Of course it isn't totally useless. But think about it. In a project with no particular capital requirements (only labour), $5000 doesn't buy a lot of time. Maybe it would buy 2-3 man-weeks of development, but who wants to do that? If you'd donated, say, $50,000 (enough to hire someone full-time for 6 months), then sure, I would expect some result from it.
But $5000? What are they going to do with $5000?
DrPizza on August 1, 2008 8:02 AMOh, and this open source projects need time, not money thing is a load of nonsense. Money is readily converted into time. That's what you're doing whenever you pay someone to do some development work. So seriously, don't give us that crap.
DrPizza on August 1, 2008 8:04 AMwell, very nice of you sending a $5k,
but i just want to state that not all projects are like this one, i mean there are projects that starve for money or even stop because of lack of it.
I would agree with the fact that OSS projects feed on time, not money, but again I repeat not all projects!
some developers really *like* developing for free, but they have insufficient income that doesn't leave them any time to contribute to the OSS community, if they were funded a way or another they will happily contribute their time and effort.
I would suggest they make a hack camp for a couple of days or so, and let computer science students contribute modules and themes and fix bugs or whatever, give them some mugs and t-shirts with the logo printed on it.
or else i support the suggestion of giving away the money to any other project that really needs money
mosab on August 1, 2008 10:04 AMOffer compensation to programmers. Pick a few key guys, and have them commit to working on the project full time for $N,000 where N is the number of weeks they are committing to the project.
I know I'd spend more time (and probably more valuable time (rather than the 10:00PM to 2:00AM time slot that OSS usually gets from me) if I was able to take an unpaid vacation from my day job, take the $1K compensation for the week and put a large amount of work into the project, I'm pretty sure that would help.
John Van Enk on August 1, 2008 12:06 PMThis is an older post and has a ton of comments, so hopefully someone didn't already mention this. What about using the money at somewhere like http://crowdspring.com (are there other sites like it?) or elance to get some themes or other design work done?
Doug Moore on August 1, 2008 1:36 PMThis is why ScrewTurn Wiki is just some also-ran and not being universally used and embraced. This is why you don't hear ScrewTurn as the Wiki .Net developers turn to.
This guy has $5k in the bank and doesn't know what to do with it?
He should have like 50 things to do with it! Here's a baker's dozen.
- Take a month off work and bring in a salary while you expand the program.
- Hire a designer to build better layouts.
- Fire up a UserVoice account and start taking suggestions for improvement. Then hire a student to make these improvements. (use this to supplement the roadmap, http://www.screwturn.eu/Roadmap.ashx)
- Get people installing the software by buying advertising. Buy on .Net products like Podcasts (Hanselminutes, DNR) and blogs (here, hanselman, haacked, ...), sponsor a .NET user group or two.
- Hire a mechanical turk to ensure that your wiki appears on every searchable wiki list on the net. See if you can't buy sponsored places.
- Attempt to build a hosted version like WetPaint.
- Hire people to do instructional videos on how-to use wikis.
- Hire technical writers to improve the documentation.
- Start a targeted e-mail campaign to get local businesses using the wiki (see above hosted option).
- Create a hosted version in tandem with an advertising campaign and start charging businesses for monthly use. Spend some money on someone to build videos for you.
- Run a contest for the best plug-in.
- Attend a US conference and plug your project.
Honestly, this looks like a solid wiki that's been consistently maintained (look at the history). But outside of Jeff's blog, I've never heard of it. He has a powerful product running what looks like a $10 website, he's trapped in a developer universe. This isn't about him any more, he has money in the bank to do all of the things he's no good at. Unless he admits this, the project is just going to fade into the annals of time as somebody with less talent and more marketing savvy simply makes a better product.
Jeff I share your annoyance!
Gates VP on August 3, 2008 12:40 PMA few easy options (for them):
- Hire professional graphics designer to work on various icon themes.
- A bit of advertising to raise project profile never hurts.
- A batch of T-shirts for developers. Five patch minimum or a reasonable amount of graphics design or documentation writing.
- Security Bug bounty money, a la Knuth.
- Bursaries.
It shouldn't be that hard to spend it wisely.
Pete from Perth on August 4, 2008 3:49 AMOnother suggestion: Hire Ayende to do code review and improvments and write a series of articles about it.
Tobias on August 5, 2008 5:18 AMOne thing I might do with that cash on an open-source project is take care of infrastructure. For instance, digital signatures/Authenticode, maybe a nice installation framework such as InstallShield. I know I frequently wish I had an InstallShield license, even at my proper job.
Rob Paveza on August 6, 2008 2:22 AMThere are specialists in analyzing and refactoring program code. Cleaned-up code requires less time to maintain
Patrik on August 6, 2008 8:49 AM$5000 in my experience is not enough to hire someone to do anything really significant software-wise. what i think would be the most productive use of this money would be to use it for travel grants to get some of the key developers together.
laurent oget on August 6, 2008 11:46 AMI'd take an unpaid vacation from work for about $5,000 worth of time and just focus on the open source project instead.
Justin Chase on August 7, 2008 8:41 AMlol, orange failed.
I think that everything can be good but John Romero way to spend the money.
You should supporting wrong type of projects.
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.
thank you
sohbet on August 11, 2008 3:53 AMTwo words: MONO PROJECT
www.mono-project.com
Awesome open source .NET Project!!
oranson on August 12, 2008 8:30 AM+1 to Justin's comment above. It's not that $5000 wouldn't help an open source project, it's just that it's not enough.
It's 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 don't have to spend eight hours a day at a gig to keep the lights on, they'd gladly focus on their OS project, which is likely where there passion and intellectual stimulation is really coming from. If it wasn't they wouldn't already be working on it on their free time.
So, if ten companies donated $5000, then you'd end up with one developer doing nothing else but becoming an expert in their OS technology. You need more drops in the bucket to make that work.
Daniel on August 19, 2008 9:12 AMHow about some of the above (hardware, designwork, usability testing) plus..
Books
Productivity tools (if worth it over the free stuff)
Just a sidenote: I know spelling it M$ doesn't 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 don't give any feedback to the open source community. That's 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 don't get to choose the platform you're working on, but as for me, I can't see myself donating to them, first of all because they chose a non-multi-platform medium to work on.
Lacrymology on September 16, 2008 2:47 AMHe 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 can't 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.
Anonymous Italian on January 14, 2009 2:36 AMI've 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 helpful..
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.
It's 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 don't have to spend eight hours a day at a gig to keep the lights on, they'd gladly focus on their OS project, which is likely where there passion and intellectual stimulation is really coming from. If it wasn't they wouldn't 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.
Csaba on July 8, 2009 3:04 AMevery project needs money.the cost is there.
darkfall gold on July 15, 2009 8:57 AMWow ! $5000!! Pretty high donation.
face finance on July 16, 2009 3:45 AMIf 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 it's 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?
Sherri on August 19, 2009 12:38 PMUse 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 summer's expenses, but students live cheap, and it would benefit both the project and the student's CV.
Jason Lefkowitz on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMThe 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. We've found that in-person development sprints are massively productive and hence a great thing to spend money on.
Simon Willison on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMAgree 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 aren't 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.
Aaron G on February 6, 2010 10:37 PM$5000, whilst a generous donation, wouldn't pay a contractor long enough to make a difference to the project
That's 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.
Simon Willison on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMThere are too many comments to read, so I'm 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 job's 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.
Aaron Jensen on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMPerhaps 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.
Grant Johnson on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMI 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.
Jon Pettimore on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMI 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.
Simon on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMJeff
There are a heap of good sugestions here.
Cause I am lazy :) Can you do a followup post with the best ones?
Simon on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMgive money to all contributors
eg $10 per bug found (patch must be submitted)
@Gary Schubert: use Opera and then turn off GIF aimation.
John Ferguson on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMBuy new hardware to support the development effort?
Do not have to buy like _right_now_ but when the time to get faster components come.
Aaron Seet on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMI'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.
Jason Macdonald on February 6, 2010 10:37 PM@Tim: The organization already exists. It is called Software in the Public Interest.
Grant Johnson on February 6, 2010 10:37 PMEven 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.
Priyankar Mukherjee on April 22, 2010 9:06 AMAs 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!
Timothy White on October 11, 2011 2:07 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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