From: Eleanor McHugh Date: 2009-12-20T10:28:14+09:00 Subject: Re: How to fund an open-source project? On 17 Dec 2009, at 23:28, Gregory Brown wrote: > On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Eleanor McHugh > wrote: > >> It's potentially a big project and I'd like to be able to work on it full-time so as to make reasonable progress in the coming year but I'm completely clueless about how to raise sponsorship or even whether that's practical. Does anyone with greater experience of driving an OSS project have any advice they're willing to share on this or any related topics? > > When it comes to grassroots efforts, I guess my "Ruby Mendicant" > project stands out: > http://majesticseacreature.com/mendicant/ I must admit that your success with Ruby Mendicant (which appears atypical) was the main reason I decided to raise the topic in hopes of hearing both your view on how that worked out and those of some of the people who contributed. Also as things stand I share many of the problems you had at the outset: aside from the occasional argument here on Ruby-Talk and some geeky conference presentations I don't have a particularly high community profile and as I've not been involved in open source before I don't even have a public repository of old code that people can check to decide if my time's a good investment. And of course RubyGoLightly like Prawn is an infrastructure project, so yet again there's no obvious business plan for building it commercially... > But I think that the environment is different these days, and I > struggled to get funding for the Unity project, even though I thought > this was a cool project as well: > > http://pledgie.com/campaigns/4640 It's certainly something the community could do with now we live with diverse runtimes. Whilst RubyGoLightly is light years away from RubySpec compliance (it's not even likely to compile this side of Christmas as I'm tied up with family commitments) it's my long-term hope that it could make it :) > I did end up doing at least as much work as that $270 paid for, but > the project got sidelined due to having to pay the bills with other > persuits... > > So I guess what I'm suggesting is that it might not be worth it to try > too hard to do this grassroots with the way things are lately. Even > with my success story of Ruby Mendicant, I was living at a subsistence > level off of the donations and needed to take on occasional > contracting work to supplement. This project has actually landed in my lap at a pretty weird time: my last commercial project tanked back in February and the projects I've been approached about since have all been unfunded start-ups. I've taken on several sweat equity gigs in the past but the return on investment has been lousy so I'm training myself to say 'no' to the next big thing. So anyway, on the one hand I have plenty of time available for development but on the other I'm really starting to feel the pich and need to bring in some money, even if it's only a few hundred dollars per month. I estimate that around $500 pcm is my break-even, which is pretty low, and beyond that I can fund non-essentials such as conferences and replacement hardware if anything happens to my MacBook or Wind. However because I have the spare hours anyway the work's likely to happen regardless of sponsorship, it's just I could end up living in a cardboard box somewhere whilst doing it lol The motivator for me is that I know that if I don't develop this then it's unlikely anyone else will bother. I think that would be a huge lost opportunity as Ruby really needs a decent concurrency makeover to resolve many of the scaling bottlenecks in the C runtime, something which I freely admit I may not be the right person to deliver but at least I'm willing to have a go at tackling the problem. Whilst this work won't be directly relevant to MRI my hope is that there'll be a halo effect the way there's been with JRuby and Rubinius where the better ideas are plundered and ported to C. > Better to go try to get yourself hired by Engineyard or something... :-/ That's a course of action I'd rather avoid if at all possible - my family's quite happily settled in London and not looking to relocate anytime soon. Anyway EY already have two in house Ruby development teams so I doubt a third would hold much appeal. > Or save up some money and take a few months off. I wish this were an option. That way I could have worked on this in private and if it turned out badly no one else need ever know! > At any rate, I'm happy to discuss this further if you're still > interested in the idea of getting community sponsorship. But > realistically, it'd be best to find a company willing to pay for your > work, as much as I hate to say that. Realistically the main company likely to want to sponsor this kind of work is Google, only they've always been dismissive of Ruby so I'm not sure they'd be interested. It's certainly something I'll look into though as they have a London office. Ellie Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains http://slides.games-with-brains.net http://www.linkedin.com/in/eleanormchugh