I am not sure about the laws here in the US. But what about having someone here (in the US) run the contest for best Screw Turn plugins?

Maybe you can get around the laws in Italy by using the laws in the US and running it from here.

That money IS technically collecting interest, if it's in a bank account, so it's generating even MORE money they're not using!

I think they should just hire a freelance dev to fix the most grueling bugs nobody else wants to do for free.

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.

I say hire a designer to revamp their homepage and add more themes to their product.

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.

My $0.02

Alex

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.?

Maybe a holiday to "recharge his batteries"!? :-)

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.

Just a few things off the top of my head, I really like Jon's technical writer idea by the way.

1. Outside UI help, perhaps with focus on usability.
2. Hackathon. Pay for tickets and a place to sit for the core team if they are geographically dispersed.
3. Paid time off work for one or more of the lead developers. A paid sprint if you will. Buy time.

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.

Use 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.

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...!

The 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.

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).

Agree 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.

>Gary Schubert

There's nothing on the form that says it accepts HTML, why would you think it does? If you had just posted the URL you'd have been fine.

Pay yourself to submit a patch.

I've been working on a small project for TWO YEARS now. I COULD finish it in less than a month if I had a month to dedicate myself to it EXCLUSIVELY (meaning: taking time off from my current job).

Of course, my financial needs (being married with two kids) are such that I can not take an unpaid leave of one month, and vacation time isn't feasible either. So, if someone donated me the amount of money corresponding to a month's wage, I could go to my boss and tell him "I want a month off.", and I'd probably get it.

I bet that there's a lot of other programmers in the same situation
right now... you're right in saying that open source projects run on time, not so much on money... but money DOES buy time.

I also agree with Bill: part of the problem is that the donated money HAS to be spent in a responsible manner, even if Jeff has stated explicitly he doesn't care how it's used up.

Hire somebody to do Quality Assurance. This is the area most often sorely lacking in open source.

It's also the area that few people what to do in their free time to contribute to projects.

Hire somebody to do Quality Assurance. This is the area most often sorely lacking in open source.

It's also the area that few people what to do in their free time to contribute to projects.

Another thing they could do, if the main developer is, as most Italian devs are, a contractor, stop working for a month on his daytime job, and work for a month only on his project.
Or, at least, that's what I'd do if I was a contractor.

@Trev: this is an ASP.Net wiki, and the .NET ecosystem isn't that rich compared to the dozens of wikis, forums, portals and CMSes in PHP. For an intranet, it would be pretty neat.

@Lacrymology : Spelling it M$ doesn't really add to your credibility.

Give it to contributing developer who wants to spend a month away from their day job.

Or hire a contractor for a little bit, but not for coding--perhaps art, documentation, or web design.

Regarding comments about paying developers:

1. Existing contributors don't need to get paid - they're already doing it for other reasons

2. $5000, whilst a generous donation, wouldn't pay a contractor long enough to make a difference to the project

3. I personally wouldn't let a CS student loose on my code :-), but even if Dario wanted to, an internship is (a) mostly a US thing, except for medical doctors, AFAICT, (b) kind of difficult to provide when you are not a company

Spending it on equipment or training or professionals that don't require in depth project knowledge (which leaves out tech writers) seems more sensible. Or just lots and lots of beer.

A statistical sample of size one is impossible to derive meaningful data from. Also, if the individual is employed full time then there is perhaps no direct mechanism to translate money into time -- a contractor would probably be able to use it between contracts for a couple of weeks of full time development.

"$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.

I don't think it's the case that money is useless to open source contributors, it's that such a big amount it useless. A lump-sum of $5,000 isn't enough for a developer to live off, so it's not enough to justify the developer leaving their job to devote more time. Lots of frequent donations which amount to a steady amount would be more useful, as it would allow the developer to perhaps cut down on the hours they work and be confident in being able to still live of that amount of income.

It's more of a teach a man to fish situation. The developer can't do much with the $5,000 except indulge themselves, which isn't in the open-source developers' nature. But if you encourage more people to donate and slowly-but-surely bring the amount of donations to that person up, then you can have much more of an effect.

Or you could buy him another monitor, those always save time!

Maybe they can donate it to another open source project that might be able to make use of it. ;-)

Italy? Best way to use the money would be - 4000$ to bribe a local politician to make the software mandatory for a certain council office. 1000$ to bribe a local journalist to write about the software. Then get government money to open a local software house, grab the fundings, move to the US, give back 6000$ and open a serious business there without all the hassles (taxes, laws, corruption, friendships, etc) involved in anything resembling decent work we have in Italy.

whops, did I say it out loud? Of course it was a joke.

The better way to probably spend that money like Jon suggested is probably a bounty for features. These software projects always have a long list of things that need done, and a little money is enough to spur a college student to work on the project. Probably as little as $50.00 a week would be enough to get the ball rolling and get some real features out the door.

Mono has had some really good success with the Google Summer of Code internships. Maybe that is the way get things done.

By the way on a different note, if anybody has a good idea what I can do with the domain name buggd.com I am all ears. Seems ripe for software developer website or messaging website.

Such as your code is full of _bugs_. Or stop _bugging_ me with your messages. Might even consider doing something like I mentioned above with it, if I had time to plan out what is needed.

If anybody has any good ideas, please contact me at http://www.coderjournal.com.

Having looked at his website, Dario is a contractor, 5000$ is 3300€ more or less, which is a bit less than what a contractor gets in Italy for 15 days of fulltime job.
He could, between contracts, spend 15 days on his project.

Pay for travel, fees and other expenses to go to a .NET conference or two. He could improve his skills and give a talk to drum up interest in the project, possibly leading to new contributors to the project.

Or new hardware:

* an Aeron chair :)
* extra/new larger monitors
* his dream keyboard
...

I'm surprised and disappointed by this as well. For me, my development time has a potential monetary value, so unless that time is already being compensated for via other avenues, it seems like that's kind of an obvious compensation.

Other possibilities like design, marketing, docs work seem like good ones too. I'm surprised this hadn't occurred to Dario.

I have put hundreds of hours into my own open-source projects, and donations are minimal. I did receive a grant from OWASP to work on a particular OSS project I proposed, and the money meant I could dedicate my free time to working on that project rather than other pay-for work.

We had a long discussion about this in the Tikiwiki project. Currently, we have no ads on our websites. No donations or whatsoever. Hosting is covered by some contributors, quite a few of which (including myself) make a living out of consulting around the project. When someone hires a developer to add a feature, fix a problem or anything, it's a targeted decision. They choose what they want, they choose who will do it. If you give money to the project, the community has to decide what to do with it. It's not that the projects don't need the money, it's just that they often don't have the decision making structures to decide what to do with it.

It's just a balance problem between major and minor contributors, and the conflicts that may occur simply because major contributors are pretty much the only ones who can take these decisions.

We found a few things we could do if we ended up having money:
* Pay for bounties on open bugs voted by the wide community that no one volunteered to fix.
* Cover travel expenses for developers to meet.

The last one does feel like the best way, but then we need to decide who to invite. Gatherings in the project are fairly common and they have a huge impact on community building. However, not all contributors have the same resources and currency exchange just makes matters worst.

Seriously, you should only pay for something specific. This decision making process you skip by just telling the community to do whatever they want just pushes the problem away. Instead of being alone in the process, you ask a group of people to do it. O(1) vs O(n^2) in communication paths.

Next time:
* Ask for communities what they would do with the money when they apply so the money does not sit for 4 months, or
* Invest in something that matters to you and handle the decision making yourself.

Save your charity for curing diseases or feeding the hungry.

Needy programmers should get a fucking job.

Hire a developer for them. Do the work to track down someone with the right skillset, then pay them. It's the gift of time. Let them decide what to do with the developer's time, but a decent contractor should be able to give you 50-100 hours? And maybe, you end up creating a contributor after his paid time is up.

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...

If time is what you need, buy a flux capacitor.

Simple. Hire someone to work on it full time.

You said it yourself: you don't care what they do with the money. So why do you care?

Dario: but yourself a new Aeron chair, get 3 monitors, and hire me.

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.

@a:
>There's nothing on the form that says it accepts HTML, why would you think it does? If you had just posted the URL you'd have been fine.

Write a simple url. Without wrapping it into html. Like, <a href="http://codinghorror.com">http://codinghorror.com</a>

Somewhere in a text of your message write a 'forbidden' word. I will settle on 'v-iagra' since I know it is forbidden for sure.

Type the verification word 'orange'.

Post the message. You will receive a message in red letters: Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: [here's the forbidden word]

Type the verification word 'orange' again.

Post the message. Enjoy the mess instead of the link.

They should spend the cash outside of their core competencies, which in this case is probably design/marketing.

Motivation money could be used for...
* Meet and greets - 5K is a lot of Pizza
* SWAG - "I crack code for Project X" T-Shirt?

- I also liked the bug reward proposal

Dario's a good guy, and i'm sure he'll do something cool with it once he's done punching out the next version of ScrewTurn (which WILL ROCK).

I'd totally have blown it on beer though...

> "Open source projects run on time, not money."

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.

As you quoted - open source projects run on time, not on money. And it actually TAKES TIME to spend that money.

Write me a cheque?

hookers and blow, duh!

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.

They should just hang on to the money until they need new hardware or something.

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.

I think a few people have hit on the right idea, but overall isn't the mistake yours?

Free money almost never helps. In fact, although I might be wrong, I can't think of a single situation ever where free money has helped.

Money helps when it's used as a tool and in this case, although I'm assuming it was an experiment of sorts, I fault the no strings attached aspect of the money. Throwing money at something never makes it better.

Instead an analysis of where the project is at, what it lacks, and most importantly, what it would need to better serve the benefactor should of been the first step, and then a conversation with the developers to make it clear what you were intending.

Money with strings would of been the way to go, perhaps some up front, and more upon completion, there's a few ways it could of been done, but without a goal for the money it doesn't surprise me that the money accomplished nothing.

Most people aren't self-organizing. We're just a pile of self-organized cells. :)

With 5000 bucks, you could probably run a decent, professional usability test. And since usability is precisely what a developer's time can typically not buy, this would probably be a great investment for the money.

If you have done some work with ScrewTurn or participate in the forum you know thata Dario is always there helping and developing.

So I guess the best way to spend the $5,000 is that Dario spend it on himself or a in trip or vacations.

If that money is still unclaimed, I'll take it.

<<Open source projects run on time, not money>>

Didn't Einstein prove that time = money?

Problem solved:

OSS needs time, not money. $5k not enough to hire someone for long enough to get him used to the project an then produce good code.
So, the best usage ever is: can some of the lead developers get a month or two off, without salary? If yes, he/they take the money, and work as much hours as they usually do for a living, on the project.

Normally they already have knowledge and motivation. They will spontaneously work on week-ends :-) This will have an awesome effect on the project.

Often times Open Source projects would benefit from considering better/different hardware. A web based application is different in that is runs on a server, which will define the requirements relatively well. But, desktop applications, for example can require testing on many different operating systems and hardware.

At the very least, it seems reasonable to consider buying new machines or upgrading the computers the use. This is especially true if people are using computers that are given to them by their companies, which could presumably cause a licensing conflict if a relationship goes bad. I've always had pretty awesome employers so this never happened, but I still tried to make sure I kept my development of open source and personal projects separate just so there would never be any confusion that it was my time that was spent.

Forget about the money. You said "no strings". That means no strings. No following-up either. Let it go.

I say let it sit at ScrewTurn for a little while. Something will come of it, who says it needs to be spent right away. You have provided funds that might end up bailing them out when ads go low or when they need to anti up some cash.

You did and continue to do good stuff... be patient and don't underestimate Dario's ability to recognize when the time to use the money is right.

the failure to use the money shows a crushing lack of imagination.

he could have:

- used the money to pay the rent while taking an unpaid week off from his day job to spend developing the product.

- gone to a conference and spent a few days getting drunk and telling anyone who will listen how great ScrewFaceWiki or whatever is.

- paid a freelancer to fix a few bugs

I think the money would be better used if you funded student projects. Students, like me, often have a bad time getting the a project going because we are bound to what universities wants. And universities only fund "cientifical" projects, like AI, math/physics simulations and so on (and the money is short). Me and some of my colleagues once wanted to start a project to build a PSP game, but we couldn't get the college to buy us a development kit and sony do not have projects to make that avaible to students. We were overwhelmed with all the bureaucracy and we gave up on our project. Indie PC games do not get attention anymore, we might as well go after web 2.0 stuff.

I'm surprised they haven't been able to use it towards a new MSDN subscription for another developer or something like that. Those things do cost money, and it would seem like that would be the perfect fit for your donation.

Or a purchase of additional hardware to build a continuous integration / test machine.

I'm starting my own open source code project. Just as soon as somebody gives me $5000 and tells me what sort of open source project I should be conducting with it. No promises that the project will ever actually get finished, you understand...

1. Pay for a new design for their site and a new logo for the screwTurn Wiki (maybe via a contest, like you've done with stack overflow)

2. Promote the software in .Net sites like codeproject.com

3. Pay a developer to make screwTurn mono compatible

maybe u need to send it to a project that needs money, my suggestion though it may be outside your area of interest, Blender (blender.org) they need more money for future projects and developments and I'm sure they wouldn't let it sit idle

Concerning the idea of spending the $5000 on marketing:

I recently founded an Open Source marketing company and we in fact experienced similar difficulties with community-driven OSS projects. They either have a hard time collecting donations which allow them to invest in marketing, or, if they do have a budget available, they find it hard to come to a conclusion as to how a marketing strategy should look like due to conflicting visions concerning positioning of the OSS project.

OSS companies can much easier allocate their budget for activities that raise the visibility of their Open Source software, plus: they do have a natural interest in a focused marketing strategy allowing them to position themselves well against competitors.

I'm pretty amazed that they don't know how to spend it. Use it to pay for flights and hotel so that all the involved programmers can meet up and discuss the project. Meeting face to face always gets an amazing amount done, but perhaps this isn't obvious to a team that is always distributed.

From your original post : "Microsoft's $5,000 grant will be handled independently; details will be forthcoming soon on that."

What did Microsoft do ? Did they send their share of the money too ?

Well, they can always use the money to move out of their parents' basement.

Bug bounties. If a $100 reward is offered for the solving of the top 50 problems, that takes care of the whole amount, and does a great job of improving the application. Not only that, but it'll get the project a bit more publicity, too, both from programmers and your run-of-the-mill online gawker.

Massive advertising blitz!

As in, put windows on all the pillows at the conference, or something equally fun.

These kind of things require some forethought and connections though. It make some time to stir them up.

Hire out the neglected parts of the project. These are inevitably:

1) QA and QC (There's a difference).

2) Interface design by someone who actually knows how to do it.

3) Documentation (By someone who has not been corrupted by Microsoft style "documentation")

4) Installation (Loop back to QA)

These 4 things are usually what maims or kills otherwise good software projects - open source or not.

Cheers!

I like ScrewTurn wiki, but it could be better. Compare it to Deki wiki. Hiring a good designer would be a good use of 5K. Their homepage is terrible. Other than that, I say send Dario to the PDC.

Maybe for future donations, open source projects should apply for grants for specific things. However, just because they haven't spent the money yet, doesn't mean it won't go to good use.

> 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.

It's certainly not enough for a complete overhaul, but should cover a basic streamlining or a new logo (without too many revisions involved).

> Pay for a new design for their site and a new logo for the screwTurn Wiki (maybe via a contest, like you've done with stack overflow)

Good god no -- contests are antithetical to the design process and just a nicer word for spec work, which most designers worth their salt will avoid like the plague.

There 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.

Well I think money can help, but it has to reach a tipping point. $5K, while alot, doesn't solve the issue of time. But $80,000+ a year, and a OSS developer can start considering going full time.

$5000 doesn't buy you a whole lot of time.

Jeff,

Don't jump to conclusions. Is it me, or are you making a false logical leap here?

When you say "contributing money isn't an effective way to advance an open source project"

You are making the leap that contributing money doesn't help any open source project.

And that's just not true.

There are plenty of well-organized open source projects that need money every day.

The GNOME project posted a budget with a significant shortfall this year. I am sure they could use the money. They are just one instance. The Free Software Foundation allows for both general giving and directed giving to fund specific goals and projects such as the GNUstep Project, the GNUpdf Project and the Mailman Project. The Apache Foundation accepts donations and, at $5000, you could have had Bronze sponsorship status.

These organizations use the money to manage their infrastructure, support office staffs, hire fellows and interns, and run conferences.

I think you just chose badly.

I wonder if you made the mistake of not asking the organization if they needed

Perhaps the problem is that it's too much money? If I were to receive 2,500 I would probably buy a car, but if I were to receive 2,500,000 I would probably spend a bit and leave the rest. To a project that has survived without money it's almost the equivalent.

Maybe it's the fact that projects are being given money without the explicit need for it. It'd be good to see you and a couple of other software professionals band together with some earnings and form a 'Dragon's Den' type scenario, where Open Source Projects could pitch a request for money to you.

The project you donated to is just being retarded. Software developers time is in short supply, so you buy their time, just like any company does. It would be really easy for them to use it like summer of code does. I am currently a summer of code student so I know its easy. They just put up on their website that they are seeking say 8 weeks of full time work on their project to be reimbursed with $5000. Accept applications which state qualifications and what they would propose to work on and accomplish. Accept one and have someone get regular updates on their work and advise them. Pay them at half way and completion of their work is they actually do the work. You could split some of the money off to pay the person who has to do the advising and application stuff.

Looks like Mozilla Russia have put a bounty on some bugs, so one suggestion is to pay for known bugs to be fixed:

http://www.mozilla-russia.org/contribute/bounty-en.html

The previous commenter's suggestion to pay for artwork sounds the most useful to me though. Many of us can code but are bad at graphic design.

I think he should give the money back to you.

There is no such thing as "no strings attached". Clearly you did attach strings (open source, blah, blah, blah) and secondly the psychological principle of reciprocation means that the recipient of your gift will feel extremely obligated to provide something in return. In fact you've probably done more harm than good by providing this donation, at best it's been a useless distraction for the developer.

A lot of small open source software gets written because its fun to write code. It isn't a full time job and never will be, throwing money at one of these developers is like giving your neighbor $5k to spend on his woodworking hobby. Imagine how obligated you'd feel if that happened to you.

Having an artist paid for graphics sounds like a really good idea. Indeed, I agree with Gary. Most OpenSource projects produce software that looks little appealing compared to commercial software. E.g. see KDE. KDE 4.1 looks almost "acceptable", everything before it looked rather poor. If KDE was a commercial project, already the first released had looked similar to 4.1, why? Because if it does not look appealing, people won't buy it. Since OS software is not sold, it does not have to look appealing, thus it doesn't.

Or Firefox. starting with Fx 3 it starts looking nice, everything before was more or less ugly (depending on which platform you used it). It might be just eye candy, but eye candy is what the user loves to see, even though the developer will say it's a waste of time.

If they pay an artist for it, they will own the resulting graphics and can offer them under OS license again, that way everything stays OS and other OS projects are even free to copy the graphics for their apps as well, so it helps everyone, not just one single project.

Well first of f'ing all, if it's just going to sit somewhere it shouldn't be sitting in a bank. Put it where it can accrue interest at a rate better than %1. A CD, high-interest savings, something.

Secondly, I'm looking at their page and it's ugly. Hire a designer to come up with a custom theme for their homepage. Have the designer create a series of themes for their wiki. I'm looking at their user themes page and there's only one theme listed, the default theme. Maybe a lot of the pages haven't been updated with new content and that's why I can't see any theme previews? Which brings me to my third point.

Hire someone to maintain update content every now and then if the authors don't have any time. Heck if the authors don't have time, take a week of vacation, pay them a weeks salary out of the grant, and update the content.

Maybe offer $50 a person to anyone who wants to do a Ooovo/Skype/Whatever usability session.

Sure, go to PDC, have fun. Maybe instead of snoring through sessions they could host a Screwturn user group party at PDC. Good marketing, bound to be a few users of Screwturn wiki at PDC. Maybe buy a booth at PDC?

It's $5000, lots of opportunity for big bang or long term activities.

Open sourcers give time for free but still need to pay the bills so

* Buy Hardware
* Buy Time : Pay for someone already contributing to take time off to blitz the code
* Buy Time and Expertise : Pay for an expert to add to the project (Graphic designer, Web Designer, etc..)
* Buy enthusiasm : Pay for prizes for best contribution?

Perhaps 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.

My assumption is that the recipient didn't solicit you for the donation, but I'm not sure it would matter if he had. I don't remember anyone being required to submit a "I'll do this if you give me the check." statement.

I don't have a "Do this if someone gives me a big check" list and suspect that I might just stick the money in the bank too. Seems prudent to me. There might be a point where that money is needed - if advertising or donations fall, then the cash will be there to take care of the hosting needs. Or maybe six months from now, there will be a need for the funds for another reason. It'll be there when that reason comes up.

Not sure why this is a big deal - you did specify that there weren't any strings attached, right? I find it interesting that you are "crushingly disappointed" because the guy hasn't spent the money yet... is it burning a hole in your pocket? Obviously it isn't burning one in his.

I like the idea of hiring somebody outside the expertise of the team to provide a service like a technical writer or marketing stuff.

Use the money to buy what you can't get, not what you can get with time.

Through open source enthusiasts are mostly developers, there must be some people in the community who are lawyers, buissinessmen, marketers, etc. Could it become standard for open source projects to have one guy like that onboard too just to help do things like this (ie investment) with their time-donation?

I second all those that mentioned hiring a designer. Their product could use some serious help from more "right-brained" individuals.

In the end, successful software is about user experience, not sweet code.

@Lacrymology:

Please note: "Open Source" means just that - open, publicly-available source code. Nowhere is it written that just because code is written in .NET that it is not open source.

Thank you.

>> Forget about the money. You said "no strings". That means no strings. No following-up either. Let it go.

+1 to Dave!

Why on earth is your entire site in *italics* - my goodness man, this has to stop.

Hi Jeff!
I'm a VB.net developer, but I started my web developing with PHP as there's no free ASP.net server. So now (after a year) I bought a PHP hosting and not a ASP.net one, because I become PHP Pro. So I think the first think is to make available a free ASP.net hosting for beginners. it won't costs a lot (i think so) but will help many people and startups.

Hi Jeff!
I'm a VB.net developer, but I started my web developing with PHP as there's no free ASP.net server. So now (after a year) I bought a PHP hosting and not a ASP.net one, because I become PHP Pro. So I think the first think is to make available a free ASP.net hosting for beginners. it won't costs a lot (i think so) but will help many people and startups.
BTWN I got the following error on my first post for the comment

Rebuild failed: Renaming tempfile 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001158.html.new' failed: Renaming 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001158.html.new' to 'C:\codinghorror\blog\archives\001158.html' failed: Permission denied

It was posted twice different version :( :) delete the two last ones!

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.

What are the three biggest recurring knocks against OSS and at the same time the things that nobody seems to want to donate to?

DOCUMENTATION, DOCUMENTATION, DOCUMENTATION.

If the $5K could be used to assist either ScrewTurn WIKI or anything else in producing quality documentation, tutorials, or other valuable non-code artifacts, then that seems to me to be the thing most worth doing: spend the $$$ for things that you CANNOT get contributors to volunteer time to accomplish.

They should have 1 person spend 8 hours a dya day-trading with your 5,00.... then give you 10% of any profits every month

Continuous integration server, unless they already have one.
Other machines to test on: low end, high end hardware, different OS versions, patchlevels, etc.
Mini conference: usually generates lots of coding activity, new sub-projects, etc.
You had a blog entry about fighter jets and fast turnarounds: upgrades to existing hardware for that purpose.
Commercial development tools, for QA, tests with different compilers, bug spotting. 5k might not go far.

But it's always easier to tell someone else how to spend ths money, strangely...

When not spending money is a bad thing you know the economics of the situation are f-ed up.

So, I think your experiment revealed a problem in how you approached the problem (which is sort of the point of an experiment, I guess).

In a lot of companies you have at least one business guy that handles lots of non-programming tasks so that the devs can just develop the product. You know, like getting office space, taking care of payroll, lining up sales, taking care of the website, buying pizza during crunch time, authorizing new purchases, etc, etc.

It appears that this organization has no such person. It's technical leadership for a technical project.

If you want to get the $5K used well, the easiest way is to find a good use, then briefly take that management role. If they need a designer, find one, hire him, and manage him to improve the design. If they need computers, find out what specs they need and take care of the transaction. If they want to have a f2f meeting/party/sprint of the major devs, figure out their schedules, find a good deal on accommodations and travel, and organize an agenda. If an intern is the best idea, find one, find a bite-sized task, set up interviews, and hire him.

This group apparently has lots of technical leadership, but having them organize any of those things would take the best programmer away from programming. They need an administrator to contribute time.

Many OSS groups have management/administration (Mozilla is a good example), and these can take advantage of donations better than smaller groups can.

If some people in the development team have other jobs and developing Screwturn in their spare times, they can take a non-paid break from their jobs for the total of days that money can cover & concentrate on the project at that period.

There are several ways to use the money imho:

1. Buy some books, old school or eBook, or subscription for Safari?
2. Hire a professional artist for CSS, logo and other eye candy.
3. Buy some professional tools for profiling, lint, etc
4. Buy a beer for the dev and main contributors as moral stimulation.
5. Sponsor the travel and itinerary for a talk in OSCON to spread the word
6. Buy some AdWord to spread the word
7. Buy some gadgets(ex. iPhone) for accessibility testing?

You admirably donate money to one project, which appears to be unable to easily use the money for legal reasons, and you therefore infer that donating to all open-source projects is a lost cause? Perhaps the $5000 could buy a larger sample space?

One big problem is that $5000 just isn't a lot of money. If it were a few billion, they could just buy a building and staff it with lots of people.

The best use, is for a summer co-op student. Get a local software company to volunteer some office space and a computer, then use the money to hire a co-op to refactor some of the uglier code. Supervising the work (for free) is the biggest problem, get past that and it's easy.

Possible called it a micro-grant and let the student work from home? It should be 'tangible' work, that can be monitored.

Paul.

Use it for a couple development machines, or a front end web proxy or other component of the wiki system. Its tempting to wait for the 100% ideal use for the money however since you do want it spent, the lesson might be to just spend it now on something less than ideal.

The simplest way to spend the money is never the easiest. There seems to be various ways they could handle this.

If they have a contest for best plug-ins, etc, they could hire a lawyer to review the contest details for legalities as well as review their license for the project to make sure it is fully within the realm required.

They could use the money to better promote the project. AdWords, PPC, etc., all would make use of the money to make the project bigger.

However, there was one suggestion thus far that really would make this project a bigger project without making the money directly change it. Purchase another computer, and bring in local high school kids to work part-time on this project. In a way, they could do this at home, however, this would be a learning experience for everyone. Use the money for transportation, items, another computer, etc all to allow the project to not grow bigger by users, but grow bigger by the experience of working with and on the project.

I think next time you give money, you need to give out a certain boundary of the cash use...$1,000 for marketing to an OSP, $1,000 for server upgrades, $1,000 for legal costs, etc.

Just my 2 pennies

I'm late to the commenting, so nobody will ever read this, or it's a dupe, but I'm not reading through all the comments to try and figure that out.

They should pay people to set up a ScrewTurn Wiki site of their own. Have a contest. Top site gets $1000, then $500, then $100 to a bunch of little guys, and maybe even some smaller prizes. Make the contest go on for a year, to see who can accumulate the most content, users, and also judge things based on originality.

The best thing they could ask for is for more people to be using their product. More real world testing, more motivation for people to send in patches, more reason for other companies to put ads on their site.

Why didn't you ask how the money would be used before you made the donation?

Um, I have an open source project. I would happily take the $5k - I'd use it as encouragement to keep developing open source projects and would probably pay down my loans.

Although, since I am the sole maintainer/developer of my project, maybe I would feel less guilt using it as personal payment than I would if I had a huge development team.

No shortage of ideas here!!

You hit the oldest and most pervasive problem in philanthropy: What to do with the money?

It's not an easy problem to solve, ever. The problem is compounded by the fact that solving the problem takes time, which effectively eats into the contribution. Effective charitable organizations try to minimize their administrative costs, but they don't eliminate administration.

What you've set up is a charitable organization that has no administration, that the money goes unused (or is used poorly) shouldn't be a surprise.

If you're serious about letting the project organizer spend it on beer, then why not just send him $5,000 worth of beer? I imagine that it's because you're not sure that beer is what he really wants or needs.

But figuring out what the .Net open source community really wants or needs will take time and, yes, money. (There are a lot of good ideas in the comments, but to know which ones are actually good requires testing.)

Finally, much of the problem here is a matter of scale. at $5,000 a pop, with distributed administration, admin costs will eat significantly into each grant. If, however, you increase the size of a grant you can benefit from economies of scale.

So here's my suggestion. Save your money. Don't give out $5,000 grants. Save it up and help found an organization dedicated to supporting the .Net open-source community.

I would suggest paying for documentation.

Most open source projects are poorly documented, no one likes to do that, it's a chore. In other words, outsource the thing they lack the most, that the least amount of people want to do, and that has the biggest gains for the world (including the person donating).

But whatever you decide, I would suggest being specific about it. For example if you just give money, then it might be too big a decision involving too many people (who should get the money, who should we fly, where will the party be, who do we hire, etc.). If you specifically assign it to a task, it's delegated for the project and there are no hurt feelings ;)

I wonder, what is apache doing with the $ 100.000 they receive from Microsoft?

http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html

Boy, I would be glad to get even one tenth of that prize. The project I'm working on (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Kosmos) needs a lot of quite fat and expensive books on computer graphics and cartography. And I would also like to host a web map.

So no problem in spending money here :)

My vote goes for branding and a lack of ads. I'm not intimate with the project other than hearing about it here, but when I visit the page I'm immediately drawn to the distracting ad. $5k could pay ad costs for awhile, and certainly produce some branding which all projects need.

I have to agree with those above in saying this is not the worst outcome. When something comes up, and it will, it'll be covered by Coding Horror.

...btw, in reading comments, people are horrifically abusive. I have no idea how you handle it every day Jeff.

They should pay someone to set up a bug tracking system (bugzilla or whatever) for this project, for replacement of the actual way of bug reporting/tracking/solving, which is a forum section. That person should also "migrate" the bug reports in the forum to the new platform. That would improve the usability of the project, and the developers own way of handling and keeping track of bugs.

As alternatives, make a "bug squashing contest" with the money going for the guy that solves more (reported) bugs in one defined month. Or pay someone to do the translation to one still not supported language (noticed that there's no Portuguese support yet, for instance). Now, you need to have in mind that spending money also takes time ;-) If they don't want to spend that time, then suggest to use that money to finance other Open Source project - they're using phpBB, an phpBB is trying to get money by displaying advertisements, so maybe they could use that money to place an ad on phpBB website. And they use an wordpress blog with a theme made by Fahlstad.se - which is asking for PayPal donations - so they could always give them the money. Or - heck - give the money to any other open source software they like, as they seem fit.

On open source projects and money (in general), I must say that I don't really see that this example can be taken as conclusive. I have some examples of open source projects that make good use of the money given to them, and others that actually are in need of money to do some things. In doubt, you can always help the Free Software Foundation, for instance. Recently a "Google SoC"-like event started in Portugal, where money is the reason for 10 new Open Source projects.

Most open source projects are lacking in documentation, and are therefore only used by experienced developers. Hiring a technical writer to produce good, quality documentation would be an excellent use for the funds.

Simply sitting on the money may be one of the best possible things to can do with such a sum - saving for a rainy day, if you like. Having funds that can be deployed rapidly during unforeseen circumstances can help to reduce the impact of potential threats to the stability and continuity of a project, and is a tell-tail sign of a mature, forward-looking community.

One common scenario that free software projects encounter is legal threats from opportunistic companies and poisonous individuals. I'm not thinking so much of the large patent trolls or the giant software behemoths on their annual "reign-of-terror" against which a small sum will provide inadequate protection, but rather the threats from the smaller imps which can still have a significant negative effect by wasting the project leaders' time and energy that would better be spent on coding and project management.

I have on a couple such occasions put donations to my projects to good use to publicly rebut idle threats. I'd rather invest a small amount towards some well-written legal advice than waste time arguing perpetually in matters about which I have only limited authority.

Like most free software developers, I do not expect payment as compensation for the time spent on my own projects. If this were the case I would have abandoned them long ago since there is no conceivable way that I am likely to receive the amount I would expect for upholding the long-term responsibility to fix bugs and protect people's investment in the project by adding such new functionality necessary to maintain its relevance in the marketplace. It would surely make more sense to be paid on contract for programming somebody else's project (commercial or otherwise) where the responsibility ceases as soon as the money stops coming in!

Essentially, I enjoy working on free software projects for a variety of non-commercial reasons that I'll not enumerate here. I wholeheartedly agree that the life-blood of free software is the developer time that can be volunteered to it, and this is a precious commodity. I have on several occasions used lump sum donations in exchange for my time that I would otherwise have been required to place into something more mundane, for instance to pay for a garage to fix the car (instead of doing it myself) so that I could spend the weekend coding on project - essentially buying back my own time!

I think that the above scenario represents another good use of "rainy-day" donations that the benefit of a free software project, although I know other (more ascetic) developers that would be quick to disagree.

In my opinion not spending the money isn't a bad thing at all. Eventually they will have expenses, be it hardware, a designer, furniture, office space or a library of Jeff's recommended readings. Until then, let the money collect interest, why hurry to spend it right away?

I would suggest sending enough money for some good weed to get through long nights of coding.

I would suggest sending enough money for some good weed to get through long nights of coding.

- Specify a well-defined task to accomplish
- Ask for a coder to do the task for money on http://www.rentacoder.com/

Money in open source projects may end up just being:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_Discord

The real question is how do you spend money in an open source project? The last thing you want to do is cause team infighting...

If the project lead took a vacation to devote to his project, how would the other contributors react?

I think you drew too much of a conclusion of what Open Source is. And, it appears that many of the people who replied have similar ideas.

There is an idea that Open Source software is written by a bunch of software hippies who are anti-capitalistic and would believe in free love if they could ever figure out how to get close enough to a girl. Open Source is merely a philosophy that you can benefit by opening up your software to all coders.

Some Open Source projects are very large, need lots of hardware and actually pay people to do such things as documentation, testing, and even (gasp!) development.

Most Open Source developers are actually paid for their work. IBM, Apple, Sun, Google, and maybe even Microsoft pay developers to work on various Open Source projects.

Some Open Source projects (like Joomla) are run by the very people who use that software in their own jobs. Some like MySQL are created by companies that decided the best way to make money was to get their product used by millions of people and then make money through training and support.

All Open Source means is that the development team decided to make the code freely available to the world, and there is a wide variety of reasons for doing that. Sometimes it is purely done for philosophical reasons, but most of the time, it is for strong business reasons.

I don't know much about the Windows Open Source community, but in the Unix world, you couldn't even start coding without Open Source projects. At my work, our development team depends upon Linux, Spring Framework, Subversion, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat, Hudson, and probably another dozen or more Open Source packages.

Isn't this what Bill G found with his foundation - money without strings attached is wasted?

>> Forget about the money. You said "no strings". That means no strings. No following-up either. Let it go.

Another +1 to Dave.

Not that it wasn't expected though. I mean, this is Jeff.

My fingers are so used to typing 'codinghorror.com' I just put it as my website. Spooky.

Well now, how to spend money. hmm some ideas:

1) Google summer of code now fall and winter of code too
2) PAID student coding projects (learning based) We can only cover so much in a classroom
3) Scholarships in programming (not the CS light programming , but the real calculus, physics based stuff) at your local College.
4) Create a game contest(s) - by the "new" old 8(16?)bit boards from think geeks(?) and give out 30 of them to schools for a battle of the side scrollers contest with a $ or thing award.
5) open source library of books (say the O' books) for the first 100 "subscribers"? Books are expensive!

How's that for getting code writing out to where it needs to be?

So many of my really bright students fight to find the small funding they need to go to school, and anything that helps that is good. Additionally anything that gets the students excited enough to crack open a compiler and code is a win - especially if I can get "real programmers" to give feedback (with the understanding that they are raw programmers, and feedback good critiques!)

Just some rambling from a college professor.

I'd think a Safari subscription or conference trip for a key developer(s) would pay off nicely.

Other options would be to pay for somethings that they might normally do without like higher quality hosting or service contracts. Would a TechNet Subscription help? What about a dedicated server? A MYSQL or SQL server service contract or VMWare Workstation licenses aren't free but can be big help.

Most volunteer efforts I've been involved in go to crap once money is introduced. I'm not talking Open Source i mean ANY organization of volunteers doing anything.

There is a reason many charities do canned food drives and not money donations. Who decides What and How the money is spent? Are we now an oligarchy, representative democracy or dictatorship, who's treasurer, did they get elected, can they be trusted? If ANY of the other volunteers disapprove, now you have drama and major problems. It can turn a bunch of volunteers having fun into a squabbling bunch of children.

I've seen it in charity groups, live action role playing troupes, movie clubs .. you name it. In a lot of organizations i've taken part in, we go out of our way to avoid money. NO cash, donate a book, some supplies, your TIME that is fine but NO cash.

>3) Scholarships in programming (not the CS light programming , but the real calculus, physics based stuff) at your local College.

>Just some rambling from a college professor.

I think I smell some bias!

Jeff, I share your astonisment at the lack of imagination on the part of the developers. As a user of Screwturn Wiki I have 2 ideas on what they could spend the money on:

1. Hire a web designer to create some themes, the themes Screwturn comes with are appalling.
2. Hire a technical writer to create some useful documentation. The current docs are a shambles and make installing and working with screwturn anything but easy.

Aha! So open source is "the way" to a Star Trek (-like?) world where money no longer has value!

Seriously though, just about any way I can think of to make money useful for a project has the risk of making that project *depend* on that money, which might effectively kill the project. I.e. money might not just be useless to an open source project, it might be dangerous as well. Basically the thing you might be causing, and need to look out for is "money addiction" (project wide).

Give it to the Mono people so .NET won't be stuck in the Windows ghetto forever.

> 1. Hire a web designer to create some themes, the themes Screwturn comes with are appalling.
> 2. Hire a technical writer to create some useful documentation. The current docs are a shambles and make installing and working with screwturn anything but easy.

Actually, the problem with hiring people is that it requires time (legal stuff among others). There's also the "add more people to a late software project and it will be later" principle, i.e. it will initially cost more time than it will yield. Thus the question is, will the money have run out before any additional spent time is gained?

As that's the real problem here: finding ways to convert money into time.

Next time around, maybe you should consider giving money to projects that have a clear idea of what to do with money, and how much is needed.

There are some great ideas in the comments here. I favor these, personally:

> 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.

> 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!

> Hackathon. Pay for tickets and a place to sit for the core team if they are geographically dispersed.

> Pay for travel, fees and other expenses to go to a .NET conference or two. He could improve his skills and give a talk to drum up interest in the project, possibly leading to new contributors to the project.

It's up to Dario, of course, but I'm particularly fond of the "offsite hackathon" with key contributors. Putting a bunch of geeks in a room for a few days and letting them hack together on the codebase would be fun, wouldn't it?

Jeff, I really think it depends on the maturity of the projects. Some projects are just not... capable of handling money. "What to do with the money?" is their question. Or they are just happy with the few donations that they get to survive (which is not bad, at all).

I'm backup up a previous comment on Blender (www.blender.org). It has been an open source app for several years now. And it is constantly fed by money! They even have set up a "Blender Institute" which - in a few words - serves as a office/studio that aims supporting projects made on Blender (for instance the newly release Big Buck Bunny) and all expenses are covered by contributions or money made by the Institute. The purpose of it is that by making things easier for artists/developers, the whole Blender community gets benefited by awesome new features... for free!

That's putting money into good use.

I'm by no means advertising Blender (or am I?). I'm just using it as an example that some Open Source projects do know what to do with money they receive.

I would break it up at least part of the money and send it to the projects whose software I've used. I could also use another server as an offsite mirror (gotta love living in New Orleans).

I might be a bit far down the page here, but $5000 will get you a student developer for an entire summer here in New Zealand.

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 :) Can you do a followup post with the best ones?

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:

1) 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.

2) 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.

-Max

>>> 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.

-Max

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 :)).

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

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.

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.

I think you picked a good guy to give it to.

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.

Advertising.

And then spend it on advertising.

And then, if there's any left, spend it on advertising.

You could have the best product in the world but it doesn't matter if no one knows you have it.

Spend it on GoogleAds.

I think you should strongly suggest that they get drunk and high and code in that state, i used to program for days on instant coffee and beer(one beverage, beware insane fizzing, part of the fun.) when i was bored the code is rarely worse off at the end of it.

I think they should return the money to you.

Worse than them not using it is that you gave money to yet another undifferentiated wiki. Do we need another? Looked at another way, is it likely that THIS particular wiki will make a dent in wiki-space? I'd give money towards something that either:

a) breaks new ground or creates a new category
b) something that, if they had additional funds, had a chance of getting on the map in their category

Regards

May be Jeff, they need good developers or architechts more than they need money.
They might find skills of people like you more usefull.

They can print up some nice flyers, buy some useless chatchkies (sp) with their logo and website - hand them out at OSS developer cons try to attract more support. Maybe buy gear needed to film/record/edit/burn demo CD/DVDs.

If time is valuable - think what things $5,000 would get you that could save time (i.e. if you are stick on a desktop a laptop may be a good pick, maybe a better/faster printer, IDE license. Convention/symposium/training admission/airfare? (especially if dome developer is stick on adapting a new technology - class, video, books to get up to speed on AJAX or something)

I have read halfway through the comments. I'll digest them all later so sorry if this have been said before.

I agree that opensource project need time and not money. But money can 'buy' time. The team could use the money on tools. Better IDE's could increase productivity. throw a party for the team, while may seem like useless improves morale and is especially usefull for old projects where the devs are burnt out and commitment maybe wavering. A good chair or new egonomic keyboards for all coders can improve productivity more than another software engineering book.

There are so many ways that the project can benefit without spending money directly on it. At the end of the day the project is the people. You spend the money on the people then you can;t be wrong.

Spending on advertising is not too important i think. I believe that the current OSS scene is strong enough that any good project will get the attention it deserve.

That's my 2cents.

I guess $5.000 will hire you a top-notch full time programmer for two months in Italy. I'm in Spain and the two countries are about at the same level.

Cheers & Good luck.

I think the problem is Italy; I'm Italian and live in Italy, so I know what I'm talking about.
It is almost impossible for any individual to put up a contest in italy, too many complicated laws to fight against...
I think the simpler thing he could is to work on the project full time for a while, that is 5000$/his_daily_rate_at_work days, or hire someone to do so.

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

I'm not sure about the open source .NET project but I surely know how would i invest that kind of money and even more in creating a Non-Profit Organization specialized on quality open source game development (cross-platform).

IMHO improving the gaming experience on open source operating system will highly attract more users to the open source desktop side and indirectly scale development, as well as market share of Linux and related projects...

Anyway, I'm already working on this for quite some time, but getting the necessary funds required for a great start will take me a few months of work :-)

If anyone interested in this, feel free to ask questions: dk.vali@gmail.com

P.S.: Any kind of help will be likely very appreciated.

Best regards,
Vali

I suggest to buy liquor and cigarettes, throw a huge party and play it on the ponies.

First, the fact that they didn't spend money doesn't indicate anything wrong. It just indicates they want to use the money efficiently for the project instead of wasting it. I could see 3 potential uses of the money, 1 1 good, 1 OK and one outright bad.

Outright BAD :
*giving to developpers or contractors
It will create ill-will among unpaid (or less paid) developpers

OK :
* hiring someone for quality insurance or graphical design
It may improve the software in one of the areas where finding volunteers seems the hardest

Good :
* hiring some corporate seller, who will try to "sell" the software to users, by organising demos and targeted advertising. This will make the project more widely use, hence more popular, and it may also bring a certain number of new developpers

How would I spend it if I were a young project looking for more talent? Go to some conferences and see if I can drum up interest by presenting. It's a good way of getting more talent onto your team, and possibly even more people interested in using your software.

Well done Jeff for giving them the money. You could always console yourself that it's the thought that counts? I bet it boosted their morale to receive the money... In that spirit I will get busy clicking your ads :)

I think they used the money well by not spending it right away. It is emergency money that will become useful at an unexpected time. By spending it needlessly now, that would be wasting its true purpose.

Also, you mentioned it was a no strings attached donation, so it's probably better if you forget about it (and perhaps not even follow up on it). By following up with the recipient of the donation, it implies that there's a still a string attached. I would think of it as a payment or one-time salary to the project creator that he has earned through hard work.

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.

Maybe they can spend the money on education. Like booking a customized workshop from a well-known and honored training company (including hotel and supply)?

I would use it to pay volunteer's travel and accomodation costs to a conference or a small meeting.

Well, I have a better idea,
Buy me some .net books from amazon, give me a small part of the money, and I will learn and code .NET for you ...

:D

My .02 euros:

- Don't pay for coding, especially not by setting up a regular program to pay bounties or whatever. You've already got coders, and you risk a negative effect on the culture of the effort by introducing payment to coders.

- One suggestion I haven't seen (at least after plowing through about the first 1/5 of comments) is organising a get-together for the developers. $5,000 could pay for a small venue and a dinner or two in a mutually-agreed city, developers can pay their own way out. Some face to face time can have a really positive impact.

- Failing that, I agree with spending it on some specialist (non-coding!) effort that you can't easily get contributed, such as usability, design, or documentation. Just make sure it's done in a way that can be maintained going forward, a pretty package of docs or whatever will start decaying the minute the next code commit comes in.

how about open-source games like UFO Alien Invasion, TORCS and many more? some say open source doesn't work for games. perhaps, because of high quality art/content that is expensive. an open-source game project could benefit from a donation by buying royality free 3d models, textures, sounds, or paying professionals for creating them and then releasing them under some Creative Commons lincense...

Use the money to pay for a week not working on the project. Pay for some food and drink for the office for two weeks, get the devlopers to come in and work on whatever they want, in whatever field and however they want to do it.

Promote looking at new technologies, but try getting some form of deliverable from all developers at the end of the two weeks, a presentation on how things went for them, how they liked the technology, or even better, a working application.

Then have a night out.

This will help open up the imagination again and will allow your developers to come back to the project, fresh with new ideas, and an improved view of their peers.

Depending on where everyone involved is, it might be worthwhile to get a retreat/meetup for the dev team. I run a one-man project[0] that is mostly dependent on another one[1], and last year I was sponsored by a commercial integrator[2] of both projects to visit LinuxWorld with them - getting some facetime for a week was the most valuable part of the whole thing. Things go faster and smoother when you are all in the same room. Depends on the project and the geography of course - $5K doesn't cover *too* much travel.

Other than that, my project is mostly self-sustaining - I've used ad revenue to pay for some design work, and some hosting. As Jeff says, time is the big issue, especially time when you actually feel motivated to work in the evenings/weekends.

[0] http://www.network-weathermap.com/
[1] http://www.cacti.net/
[2] http://www.groundworkopensource.com/

Can't they just give the devs a bonus?

wtf....Booohooo i don't know what to do with money...sheez i wish i had that problem.

I think offering up a bounty for a feature - or perhaps paying a software-testing house to do usability metrics or something for your 2.5K could be money really well spent.

Money is the reason people do shit jobs, so that's what the money should be used for IMHO. Testing, Documentation, Marketing.

You would be surprised at how much presentation affects open source projects.

Professional logo design and some very professional usability focused themes for the site/project would do wonders.

Compare the presentation of Deki Wiki to ScrewTurn, ScrewTurn would obviously be my choice, but at face value most would explore Deki first due to presentation.

I would absolutely love to see ScrewTurn with some high dollar makeup on. I think it would be amazing.

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.

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.

One 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?

One 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.

I 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.

Jeff,

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.

You 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.

Also, 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,....)

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.

It'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.

I'd go with the hardware suggestion, if he wanted to (or felt an obligation to) spend it on something directly related to the project. Otherwise what OSS thrives on most is the people involved, so how about a good holiday as a personal reward for the people involved?

I think your main problem is that $5000 is both too much and not enough. It's enough to be a burden, not enough to actually employ someone for much time. And it's a particularly awkward amount to bestow on someone without their having a way to use it.

And of course money means different things depending on what your specific work is. I have a friend who recently got wooed to a brand new university with an offer than all faculty got some arbitrary sum, say $20,000, as a personal research budget. Scientists thought this was a paltry sum -- not nearly enough to do a lot of good with -- but my friend is an historian, and so he has way more money than he knows what to do with (trips to archives only cost so much).

I think the problem here is that your generosity led you to a "throw money at it" sort of solution. Spending doesn't get results. Spending _intelligently_ gets results.

Wow .. many of you sure are critical and mean.

Poor Dario, who out of the blue receives some money for his project, and because he doesn't have a good idea of how to spend it, waits. Yeah, what a jerk.

The money may have come with no strings attached, but imagine the backlash had Dario spent the money frivolously and Jeff reported back here. In fact, no matter how he spent it there'd be some know-it-all complaining bitterly. DDOS Witchhunt or what? Lets fry the bastard.

It has nothing to do with laudable goals such as 'open source programmers don't need money' Everyone needs money, and your company probably doesn't spend money haphazardly either.

If Dario has nothing to spend it on, then prudently, he shouldn't spend it. Thanks go to some of you with good ideas.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Read a book on constructive criticism on day. Shame on you. Didn't your momma ever tell you that if you've got nothing good to say, shut up?

Let the guy use it as a buffer.

$5K in the bank buys a lot of concentration since he won't have to worry about the day his computer crashes or if the ad revenue drops or something.

Google has a couple billions in the bank, Microsoft as well - there's a reason they're not just burning through that money.

Can I suggest a professional debugger/patcher team? Mostly, open source project don't have some people that collect bug reports, priritize them, and do a patching. Open Source is based primarily on volunteers, so it would be nice if someone is payed for full time patching. Mozilla foundation pays for its developers, so... why not?

I like the idea of having a rainy day fund - ready access to cash can really make a difference when important hardware goes bang, or some other minor catastrophy occurs.

Not sure if anyone has suggested this, but if the money has to be spent why not use the money to donate usable internet access, hosting and a copy of ScrewTrun Wiki to Charities and not for profit organisations? I have included "useful internet access" here as many charities just can't afford access, so having a nice shiney new website would be close to useless for them as they woudln't be able to update the information.

Well, that was food for thought !!
By the way why does not the word orange never change??

Dario, 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.

Contrariwise, I suspect Dario Solera sent $5000 to Jeff Atwood for this peace of viral marketing. ;-)

There 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...

Thank 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.

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.

I'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...

You'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

Buy 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.

They can put the money to better use by donating it to any project that doesn't use .NET.

As 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

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.

"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?"

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?

Oh, 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.

Offer 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.

This 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?

older??...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...:-)

well, 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

There is guilt involved in dipping into the "one and only" pot of money like that. I'd suggest you make some suggestions. If you want a suggestion from me, I'd say: attend a conference they wouldn't normally attend but may learn a lot at. Including pre-conference tutorials if they exist. For this particular project, an advanced programming language theory conference would fit the bill: something like POPL or ICFP or PLDI. They might learn some techniques they could really use, and they might get hooks into some communities they might not otherwise encounter.

This 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!

A 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.

Onother suggestion: Hire Ayende to do code review and improvments and write a series of articles about it.

There are specialists in analyzing and refactoring program code. Cleaned-up code requires less time to maintain

$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.

One 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.

I'd take an unpaid vacation from work for about $5,000 worth of time and just focus on the open source project instead.

lol, 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

Two words: MONO PROJECT

www.mono-project.com

Awesome open source .NET Project!!

+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.

How 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.

He 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.

I'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.

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

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.

every project needs money.the cost is there.

Wow ! $5000!! Pretty high donation.

If 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?